Journal Review

Thoughts on the journal article Service Positioning through Structural Change.  

The first thing that caught my attention was the age of the article; it was published in 1987 before service design existed as a quasi discipline. The author talks about marketing, service positioning and process design rather than service design per se. The article is about market positioning and differentiating a service from its competitors by strategic selection of the service complexity and divergence. Complexity being a measure of the service process steps and sequence. Divergence is the amount of variation in the service steps and sequence. A high divergence service would be discreet while a service with low divergence would be standardised. So clearly adjusting the complexity and divergence of a service can have an enormous effect on market position and success.

The author also talks about the use of a service blueprint to visualise processes and develop positioning strategies to differentiate the service from competing services. Blueprints look at a service as a system and can help to make intangible processes or aspects of the system more tangible.  

The importance of involving the service user in the process design is discussed and several methods to facilitate designing a services complexity/divergence strategy.

The article was written before the emergence of service design as it is today. After reading the article that is evident due to the lack of actual design input in the process such as co-creation workshops, service mock-ups and prototypes, and it feels more like marketing and change management. However, the aim of the techniques discussed is the same reason that modern day companies use service design; to gain a competitive advantage through differentiation from the competition.