Therefore marketing focuses upon finding the relevant customers to market goods and services at, satisfying customer needs and ensuring that needs are met which means customer loyalty is met, therefore customers are retained. Therefore in summary; as said by Rodger (1971) marketing is the process of “converting consumer spending power into effective demand for a specific product”.
Organisations, especially in the Travel and Tourism Industry must plan the way in which they are going to go about marketing their good or service. Planning aids organisations to study their history and make decisions in relation to altering ways that they carry out their marketing activities. They can study any external developments that may have an influential factor on the success on their organisation and act upon their findings. For example in the tourism industry, if long haul destinations continue to become more and more popular, then organisations should alter the bulk of their marketing to advertise exotic long haul destinations as opposed to holidays to destinations with little glamour such as Turkey and Greece. This planning can also help and prepare organisations to meet change and adapt to it quickly so they do not loose the market or money, for example changing the sort of holiday a tour operator primarily considers as the main market leader from short haul to long haul destination if the demand is changing. This is a real life example, as in the last 10 years the demand for long haul destinations has rapidly increased, as technology developed, prices dropped, and consumers had more disposable income to indulge in more luxurious holidays. Organisations are able to identify their competition and therefore are able to plan to increase the market share, having a more competitive edge. For example Airtours identifying Thomson as their main competition and planning ways to make their holidays more appealing than that of Thomson.
Planning can also help organisations improve their earnings and meet corporate objectives as planning gives them direction and something to aim for. The marketing planning process is a strategic plan which usually is set out to be achieved over a 3-5 year period. Marketers must establish the strategic content, this includes their whole purpose for existence, whether it is for financial success (organisations such as Virgin where Richard Branson has set out to make money) or to complete projects (this would include public sector organisations, and other projects such as the National Trust, where they provide a tourist attraction but with the money generated they have projects such as building restoration). In their marketing strategy they also must analyse the situation that their organisation is in, by carrying out a PEST and SWOT Analysis. A PEST analysis looks at the political, economic, social and technological factors, which affect the organisation; they are factors which are external. For example if you consider a theme park, a political factor could be new health and safety legislation, which would affect their rides, an economic factor could be the state of the economy and whether consumers have enough disposable income to spend money. Social factors affecting a theme park could consist of changing attitudes towards theme parks, for example consumers may feel that it is too expensive, therefore would not visit them. Finally a technological factor affecting a theme park could be the introduction of new faster rides. Internal factors are analysed in the SWOT analysis, which looks at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the organisation. Again looking at my example of a theme park, a strength could be that it has all the new up to date rides which make it desirable to visit, a weakness could be bad publicity, for example at Thorpe Park a young boy died on one of their rides, which created an unsafe image of the park and its rides. An opportunity that marketers might recognise could be to extend the theme park, making the site larger and therefore making more room for the thrilling rides they offer. Threats could be from other theme parks, for example say the theme park in question was Alton Towers, and it has the threat of Drayton Manor in terms of competing for customers. Both PEST and SWOT analysis is vital in the marketing planning process and will affect decisions on marketing activities. After carrying out PEST and SWOT analysis, the marketing division of an organisation would create a marketing strategy. This would contain their objectives and strategies in terms of what services do they want to provide to what markets? And how to make their services attractive to their target markets? For example Bournemouth Council may set objectives in terms of the way they want to market the resort of Bournemouth to tourists. They would look at the services they already provide; the pier, the Aquarium, the BIC, and the Bournemouth Eye, and consider how to make these more attractive, or what other services and attractions could they develop, and market to the typical tourists who visit Bournemouth.
The marketing mix defined by Kotler as “the mixture of controllable marketing variables that the firm uses to pursue the sought level of sales in the target market”, consists of seven elements; price, product, distribution, promotion, people, process and physical evidence. Once the strategic content and strategic analysis have been carried out, an organisation is then able to establish and implement strategies for their marketing plan. Middleton defines products as “the shape or form of what is offered to prospective customers”, in the tourism industry, “products are designed for, and continuously adapted to match, target segments’ needs, expectations and ability to pay.” An example of this could be the range of hotels a tour operator offers in their brochures, each hotel with various different products to offer to customers. Price is the negotiated amount to be paid for a product set between the manufacturer, and the amount that the segment would be willing to pay for the product. Organisations will of researched into the chosen market segment (the group of people they aim there product at, be it aimed at age, sex, socio-economic groups or geographic locations) and found out the amount that customers are willing to pay for the product being offered, for example a flight to Paris – if customers only will pay £25 maximum because companies such as Easy Jet offer it so low, then British Airways would have to adapt their prices to match and remain a competitive organisation. Promotion consists of advertising, sales promotion, direct mailing, and PR, it is the most active of the 4ps, and when considering marketing, the promotional side is the first that springs to mind. All organisations promote themselves, for example, Thomson may promote their product of holidays on television, posters, and through mailing past clients, however without the price, product and place fully established and defined, the promotional side of marketing would be a waste of time and money. Place, otherwise known as distribution is the location of the product, for example a tourist attraction, but also the point of sales that give consumers access to the product. For example place for a holiday in Greece is not only in Greece, but in the travel agents, or on the internet or phone, where the holiday was purchased. Finally the next 3 elements aren’t so well known by tend to be used within the service industry, “people” consists of the numbers (customers and staff), the training carried out and personal attitudes (consumers and staff). Process is the customer involvement and procedures in service delivery, and physical evidence is the brand logo, e.g. Virgin, the furnishings, colour and lighting of an organisation.
Witt and Moutinho define marketing research as “marketing research in tourism is the systematic gathering, recording and analysis of data about problems related to the marketing of tourism services.” It is important for organisations to research into consumer behaviour, product development and monitoring distribution and performance of the marketing plan in order to help develop their organisation and ensure that they are up to date with market demands. In the marketing research process it is important to identify the context, ensure that there is a specific use for the results, set a timescale for completion and set a budget. Organisations use two types of research, primary and secondary; Secondary research should be carried out before the primary research, it is when an organisation looks at existing research perhaps from their own records, or research a competitor undertook, or use of government journals and statistics to aid them with understanding the wants of their target market. It tends to be cheaper to carry out because it is already existing information, and usually organisations only have to pay to access it. Primary research is when an organisation, such as a Hotel chain goes out and carries out research specific to what they want to find out, like Marriot in the 1980’s when they carried out extensive research into developing a new moderately priced range of hotels. However primary research is expensive and time consuming.
It is vital to for an organisation operating within the tourism industry to ensure that they are using their marketing to their full potential because the industry is the largest in the world, and the biggest single item of expenditure in people’s lives.
Marketing affects everybody and everything. Over the past fifty years the media has grown and become a lot more influential in our lives. The media is filled with marketing activities, as organisations push to sell their products in newspapers, magazines, on television and radio. The media also promotes and markets holiday destinations on television shows such as “Wish you were here” and “Holiday”. Therefore even when we read a newspaper, a product or service is being marketed at us from beneath the surface. Marketing sets out to capture us, through advertising and the other methods that organisations use such as market research in order to entice us to use their product, go on their holiday or make the most of that service they offer us. We are subjected to it through our day to day routines, it is everybody’s business because everything we do relates to marketing, when we use a suntan lotion on holiday, we are targets of marketing, and because it is likely we bought that certain product because of the way it was marketed when we were at home. Everything we buy and do, especially in leisure and tourism is a result of the influence of marketing. However it is important to remember that without customers, then there would be no reason for an organisation to exist and market their goods. Therefore our demand and desires could be argued to be the cause of existence of marketing.
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Reference
Kotler, P. (1994) Marketing Management, p.6.
