Peppard,Rylander Products and Services in Cyberspace Exploring Products and Services in Cyberspace: Towards a Categorization Joe Peppard Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield, Bedford MK43 0AL United Kingdom Phone: +44 1234 751122 j.peppard@cranfield.ac.uk Anna Rylander Royal Institute of Technology, KTH Syd, Design & Health Marinens väg 30,136 40 Haninge, Sweden Phone: +46 8 790 48 29 anna.rylander@syd.kth.se Abstract In the physical world, products and services are traditionally distinguished from each other on the basis of tangibility and intangibility; indeed, services are often described as intangible products. This distinction has governed the design and management of both. In the virtual world of the fixed and mobile Internet, however, this distinction is no longer appropriate: both products and services become intangible. This is essentially due to the fact that the Internet is not merely a technology but represents an entirely new medium for conducting business, a fact that has been overlooked by many of the early entrants into this space. This medium is defined by information and fundamentally different from the physical space where business has traditionally been conducted. Consequently, products and services require a different conceptualisation. In this paper we focus on business-to-consumer (B2C) markets and explore consumer products and services in cyberspace. Keywords Internet, online strategy, information products, digitally mediated services 1. Introduction The commercialisation of the Internet has seen it been deployed for corporate communications, for facilitating trading activities, for delivering digital content, for the provision of a wide range of services, and as a platform for collaboration. While many organisations have migrated products and services from the physical world to the virtual world, or created new and innovative offerings to take advantage of the capabilities of the technology, the lessons from these early forays indicate that it is not an electronic replication of the physical world (Butler & Peppard 1998, Evans & Wurster 2000). The Internet is more than merely a technology but represents an entirely new medium for conducting business. Not only does it have different attributes than the physical world but within this virtual space much of what we take for granted in our day-to-day activities and decision-making processes are absent. In B2C (business-to-consumer) markets, the focus of this paper, consumer behaviour is also different (Butler & Peppard 1998). In the physical world, products and services are generally distinguished from each other on the basis of tangibility and intangibility – products are portrayed as tangible while services