Raising services’ tangibility in foreign markets via marketing: A model construction and a cross‐national comparative empirical survey

Intangibility plays a critical role in the field of services and brings great managerial problems to services firms, particularly for cross‐national firms that operate in unfamiliar host markets. This study attempts to explore how to raise the tangibility of services in foreign markets by marketing‐based activities, rather than the conventional perspective based on operational activities.

Based on the literature, this study builds a six‐element model to circumscribe and define the managerial problems caused by intangibility. Moreover, this study proposes six strategies to raise consumers’ sense of tangibility toward services, namely: quantitation, ranking, factualization, substantialization, word‐of‐mouth effect, and information frequency. Following that, this study samples US‐, Japan‐, and Europe‐owned firms operating in China and Taiwan to examine the proposed model.

The results indicate that the six strategies can improve the tangibility of services sufficiently, especially quantitation, ranking, and substantialization. This study also builds a three‐construct, nine‐item services tangibility scale to measure consumers’ perceptions of tangibility toward a particular service. Statistical evidence confirms the reliability, discriminant, and convergent validity of the scale.

This study not only conducts an academic model construction on the service tangibility issue, but also provides a new insight on the services practices cross‐nationally. This study constructs the model by reviewing the literature primarily, while seeming to neglect opinions from the practical world. Future studies could solidify the model by involving more practical viewpoints with deep expert interviews and observations.