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1. Why are "core" product features often "do or die" features?

2. Your professor surveyed his undergrad students to learn of their perceptions of him before he even distributed the syllabus on the first day of class.  Of what value is this exercise to a professor as a service provider?

3. One class member has a job in which people ask questions, and she provides answers.  In this service encounter, what is the product, and what are the resources of the exchange process?

4. One class member wants to sell hats at a tourist island resort.  Why would people be willing to pay $20 for this hat as they are leaving the island, but might not pay more than $5 for the same item at the local variety store when they get home?  (Recall the notions of utility, tangible evidence.)

5. What is the core product of a college?  Who produces the core product?  What are some of the front room and back room activities associated with producing this core product?

6. From the perspective of discussions in our meetings, how is it that each and every employee at a McDonald's restaurant is an actor in a theater?

7. One student thought that it initially seemed strange to think of services as "performances" in the same manner as one thinks of theater performances.  Discuss examples of products that might typically be classified as services in which the core product really is not analogous to a theater performance.  What about these examples makes these services not really work the same as a theater performance?

8. In our customer comment analysis project, posted comments suggest that the professor tends to submit high grades.  From the perspective of attribution theory, is the professor more likely to believe that the primary cause is the students or his own teaching?  From the perspective of attribution theory, would students be more likely to believe that they earned the high marks or that this was due to extraordinary teaching?  If student grades were instead relatively low, even though the teaching is the same, would attribution theory suggest that the student comments would be any different?  Use theory to discuss potential influences on these students' comments on service quality.

9. Professors of marketing often disagree with what are the "right" things to teach in a marketing course.  The teaching of services marketing seems to suffer to an even greater degree: a search through syllabi posted online for services marketing courses suggests that there is a great diversity in how it is currently being taught.  Your own professor disagrees with much of what is in your textbook, and yet he believes that the textbook is very good and that the textbook author is one of the highest authorities on the subject.  Explain how this is so, and why it is likely that there will never ever be complete agreement as to how marketing, and especially services marketing, works.

10. According to your professor, General Motors was formed on the recognition that distinct market segments existed.  Is the same segmentation strategy, having divisions that operate as separate SBUs, possible in the production and selling of services?

11. We discussed the notion of the butterfly curve and and how it affects changes in physical products.  Apply this notion to a non-physical product.

12. One of our readings seems to suggest that quantitative surveys are not sufficient in service assessment, that qualitative research is also needed.  Is qualitative research in assessing services always necessary?  Will the mix of quantitative and qualitative research change in the future as we learn more about how services marketing and management works?

13. Leonard Barry proposed several continuums which, at that time, helped to explain some characteristic differences between goods and services.  In his text, however, Christopher Lovelock seems to downplay the value of this idea.  Who is right?  Has anything in our knowledge of services marketing and management changed in the last two decades?