Many services are difficult to understand and communicate, and as a result, difficult to position, differentiate, and sell. While important, understanding services as well-defined products has hardly received research attention although doing so offers a host of potential benefits. This conceptual article makes the following contributions. First, it synthesizes the literature to develop a better understanding of service productization as a process that transforms variable, ad-hoc services and service products into well-defined service products (i.e., ‘productized services’). Second, it advances that well-defined service products are (1) specified (i.e., have a formalized value proposition and are configured, standardized, systemized, and often also modularized and bundled), (2) branded (i.e., have a name, symbol, or design, and are identifiable by these linguistic, visual, and tangible cues), (3) and priced (i.e., have clearly stated, communicated, and committed prices that can include rate fences and tiering). Third, this article advances managerial practice by exploring the concepts and tools available to productize services and outlining managerial benefits and potential drawbacks of highly productized services.

许多服务难以理解和沟通，因此难以定位、差异化和销售。虽然很重要，但将服务理解为定义明确的产品几乎没有受到研究的关注，尽管这样做会带来许多潜在的好处。这篇概念性文章做出了以下贡献。首先，它综合了文献，以更好地理解服务产品化是一个将可变的、临时的服务和服务产品转化为明确定义的服务产品（即“产品化服务”）的过程。其次，它提出了明确定义的服务产品是 (1) 指定的（即具有正式的价值主张并且是配置的、标准化的、系统化的，并且通常还模块化和捆绑），(2) 品牌化的（即具有名称、符号或设计，并且可以通过这些语言、视觉和有形线索识别）、(3) 和定价（即，明确说明、传达和承诺价格，可以包括费率围栏和分层）。第三，本文通过探索可用于服务产品化的概念和工具并概述高度产品化服务的管理优势和潜在缺点来推进管理实践。