Marketing Digital Offerings Is Different: Strategies for Teaching About Digital Offerings in the Marketing Classroom

Abstract

Digital offerings represent different challenges for marketers than do traditional goods and services. After reviewing the literature, the authors suggest ways that the marketing of digital goods and services might be better presented to and better understood by students. The well-known four challenges of services marketing model (e.g., intangibility) first proposed by Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Barry (1985) is explored and adapted as an organizing framework for digital offerings. The authors also present specific suggestions for assignments and class discussions to foster students’ critical thinking about the marketing implications surrounding digital offerings.

Keywords:

• digital goods and services
• digital marketing
• marketing pedagogy
• teaching
• teaching strategies

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Rajiv P. Dant, Irvine Clarke III, and the reviewers for their comments on versions of this article.

Notes

1. We are cognizant that the IHIP framework has been criticized as being neither empirically derived nor tested (e.g., Keh & Pang, 2010). Other scholars have questioned whether services offerings are indeed as different from product offerings as the literature would suggest (e.g., Greenfield, 2002).

2. Though these two examples come from the traditional services marketing literature (Shoshtak, 1977), both include significant physical elements.

3. Responsive design refers to creating websites so that they can be easily read and navigated regardless of the device one is using to view the site. In the words of the term's creator, Ethan Marcotte (2010), responsive design allows a site to be viewed “along a gradient of different experiences.”