Abstract:
The literature on services marketing holds that a number of unique
characteristics separate services from tangible products. These distinguishing
characteristics make service more difficult to evaluate than goods and the
knowledge developed from experience in physical product marketing is not
sufficient to understand service consumer behaviour. From this ferment this
study is designed to examine some consumer behavior related conceptsperceived
risk, and consumer involvement (CI) -and risk coping strategies in
service purchase situations and compare them withproduct purchase situations.
The objectives of the study are (a) to examine whether the differences between
product and services influence the degree of association between the perceived
risk and the consumer involvement, (b) to investigate whether the differences
between product and services influence the consumer s risk coping strategy
selection, and (c) to discuss the strategic implications for service marketers.
The study is basically an empirical descriptive in nature. A sample survey
was conducted with a help of structured questionnaire to collect data. The
degree of association between the perceived risk and the consumer involvement was measured by calculating Pearson correlation coefficient. And, the association between the product category and the risk coping strategy selection of consumers was tested by performing Chi-Square test. The results
of the tests show that (a) there is a positive relationship between the degree
of perceived risk and the consumer involvement in both purchase situations,
and (b) the differences between product and services influence the degree of
association between the perceived risk and the consumer involvement. The
results also show that the coping strategies vary in terms of the degree of
perceived risk. The study recommend that services marketers should
understand degree of risk the service customers perceive, their degree of
involvement and coping strategies to develop their marketing programmes.
