Inseparability is used in
marketing
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
to describe a key quality of services as distinct from
goods
In economics, goods are items that satisfy human wants
and provide utility, for example, to a consumer making a purchase of a satisfying product. A common distinction is made between goods which are transferable, and services, which are not t ...
. Inseparability is the characteristic that a
service has which renders it impossible to divorce the supply or production of the service from its consumption. Other key characteristics of services include
perishability,
intangibility
Intangibility refers to the lack of palpable or tactile property making it difficult to assess service quality. According to Zeithaml et al. (1985, p. 33), “Because services are performances, rather than objects, they cannot be seen, felt, taste ...
and variability (or heterogeneity).
Although the notion of inseparability has become received wisdom in the marketing and services marketing literature over the past few decades, more recent research has challenged inseparability as a distinguishing characteristic of services.
For instance,
Lovelock and
Gummesson (2004, p. 29) conceptually argue that “there is a large group of separable services that do not involve the customer directly, with the result that production and consumption need not be simultaneous.” Examples of such separated services include freight transportation, dry cleaning, and routine maintenance on a wide array of equipment and facilities. Lovelock and Gummesson (2004) conclude that only one category of services — physical acts to customers’ bodies, such as haircut or medical examination — is inseparate. In the other three categories (i.e., physical acts to owned objects, nonphysical acts to customers’ minds, and processing of information), consumption can be separated from production, if so desired and designed into the system. Thus, inseparability is not effective as a distinguishing characteristic of services in general.
In the first empirical investigation,
Keh and Pang (2010) defined service separation as "customers’ absence from service production, which denotes the spatial separation between service production and consumption." They showed that service separation increases customers’ perceptions of not only access convenience and benefit convenience, but also performance risk and psychological risk. Subsequent research has investigated applications of service separation in a variety of contexts, including smart interactive services, telehealth, and higher (online) education.
[Keh, Hean Tat, Nicole Hartley, & Di Wang (2019). The differential effects of separated vs. unseparated services: The roles of performance risk and regulatory focus. Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 29(1), 93-118.]
References
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Services marketing