Connecting with the Invisible

Harry Beckwith, www.beckwithpartners.com

“Products are made; services are delivered,” asserts Harry Beckwith, author of Selling the Invisible, The Invisible Touch, and What Clients Love. “Products are used; services are experienced. Products possess physical characteristics we can evaluate before we buy; services do not even exist before we buy them. We request them, often paying in advance. Then we receive them.” Beckwith adds,

And finally, products are impersonal: bricks, mortar, pens, car seats, fruit—things with no human connection to us. Services, by contrast, are personal—often frighteningly so. A service relationship touches our essence and reveals the people involved: provider and customer. For that reason, a service marketing course belongs in the school of the humanities. Service marketers, like humanities scholars, strive to answer this question: “What does it mean to be a human being?”

… Our lives seem increasingly disconnected. Our grown children move farther from home; technology reduces direct contact with people. Our drive for connection grows more intense. Making genuine, human connections becomes more important everywhere—not least of all in our businesses every day.