Product and service intangibility: A study of its dimensions and consequences on product/service evaluation.

摘要

As new information technologies have been developed during the last decade, so has a new generation of products that are called "information products". Since these products are highly intangible, this renews the debate about intangibility as defined in the marketing literature, which has traditionally considered it as a unidimensional construct and has associated it almost exclusively with services.;The objectives of the study were to show that intangibility is rather a subjective, multidimensional construct and that it influences product/service evaluations. A review of the literature about intangibility and its potential consequences served to build a model for the intangibility construct.;A questionnaire survey was conducted with university students and multiple regressions were used to test the proposed model. Results showed that intangibility is rather a multidimensional construct, composed of three instead of two dimensions, as expected. Moreover, some products appear to be less tangible than many services. Managerial implications are that services marketing should not be approached from the physical intangibility perspective, but rather from the mental intangibility point of view, since it is this latter dimension that causes more difficulty of evaluation. In addition, further studies should be done to confirm the existence of a new category of intangible products often called "information products".