What business level strategy (ies) is Marriot pursuing?

Why is Marriott pursing these strategies?

Marriott has many brands because they look to make their guest’s trip successful whatever is the purpose of this traveling for business, pleasures, planning or meeting. They use different strategy for each unit or brand to achieve it goals and to be successful in the market. Marriot is using generic strategies for improving positioning and helping in satisfying their goals and customers. Also they aimed for these strategies to increase their revenues. Also for better performing better in the market and earn competitive advantages.

The most common generic strategy that Marriott using for it brands is the focus strategy. Where they are focusing in specific people and products and provide the best service.

What functional level strategies dose Marriot need to develop to support its business-level strategies?

Marriott has lodging departments which include marketing, sales, human resources, diversity, development team, purchasing, etc. These departments are following functional level strategies which aimed to improve their operations and improve their ability to reach higher efficiency, quality, innovations and customer’s responsiveness. Marriot brands are mainly focusing on differentiation and to support the business strategy. Marriot should develop the quality in some functions as following:

In marketing Marriot is focusing and caring about their customers they attracting, and retaining customers and build a customer loyalty. Their plan also included building brand equity and optimizes revenue. But they should develop and adopt getting feedback from their customer.

Human Resource Department in Marriott is performing very successfully and they provide many different training for the employees. But it still needs some development as:

• Implement evaluation system for the employees
• Give bonus and credits for distinctive employees
• Broken the barrier between different employee levels and work as one team.

What stage of the industry life cycle is the hotel industry in?

Industries go through a clear life cycle, from an embryonic stage, through growth, shakeout, and maturity, and finally into decline. Each stage has it own opportunities and threats. The hotel life cycle is on it shakeout stage in which the demand come up to saturation levels and the growth rate slows. The demand is limited because of many reasons such as: political problems and wars in some parts of the world and terrorism. The competition between hotels in this stage become more strong and the companies are compete and do a lot of promotions, attract and retain customers.

What competitive strategies does Marriott need to pursue to Achieve a competitive advantages?

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Marriott is on it shakeout stage which means that it is in point that it have to perform more carefully because there is strong competitors, slow growth and more promotions. Marriot might have to use offensive strategies which divided into two categories, the cost and differentiation to help Marriott to achieve competitive advantage.

For the cost strategy, Marriott has different cost strategy for each brand but it might need more promotion about each brand. This will attract different level of customers and will gain customer loyalty and competitive advantage.

In order to achieve differentiation advantage, Marriott has to increase it service quality by using new technologies. Although Marriott has one of the hotel leading websites and applied an online reservation system, but it still need more communication methods to reach all the internet users. Such as sending newsletters, using e-postcards, apply feedback page in the website. Using the new technology inside the company also can develop by using emails, e-documents and share drives.

The maturity and decline stages come after the shakeout stage in the hotel industry life cycle. In these stages Marriott would use defensive strategy which make it perform as it competitors to protect it market and customers.  

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