Assignment Sample on 7BSP1319 Marketing of Hospitality Sector
1. Introduction
Information and communication technology (ICT) plays a pivotal role in organizational development and hospitality industry is groping its services through digital technologies. ICT deals with wireless services, video conferencing services, media applications, social networking, middleware services, and internet tools. Hospitality industry can grow its marketing capital by involving robotic technology in its workplace. The current report is going to determine the main characteristics of hospitality industry and impacts of ICT on the hospitality sector. It will underpin an integrated marketing communication system, relationship management system, and marketing strategy of the hospitality sector. In order to implement a proper digital business strategy, a current report will provide some recommendations. It can be seen that global hospitality companies have implemented robots to give innovative services to customers. Automatic cleaning systems and automatic check-in or checkout systems are influencing customers to stay at luxurious hotels.
2. Characteristics of the hospitality sector
Hospitality is the most powerful service to support customers and it helps in maintaining a good relationship with consumers. Hospitality workers identify the needs of customers and provide them uninterrupted services to meet their goals. Intangibility, diversity, inseparability, perishability, relationship building, heterogeneity, and variability are some characteristics of hospitality sector. Hospitality industry consists of four segments such as food-beverages, travel tourism, recreation, and lodging. Many five-stars and luxurious hotels such as Hilton or Marriott are there in UK and the hotel industry contributes a huge amount of money in GDP (Statista.com, 2020). Overall revenue of the hotel industry in UK is 20.7 billion GBP, the hotel occupancy rate of UK is 79.9%, and the overall estimated rate of hotel room suppliers is 840k (Statista.com, 2020).
Hospitality industry of UK is highly dependent on international and local customers,additionally; they maintain peer-to-peer relationships with customers. Word-of-mouth communication will be most beneficial for hospitality sector to get personal attention from customers. Hospitality service providers give personalized services to their customers and prepare things according to their chosen services. For instance, frontline workers provide a service chart to customers to choose preferable services for them and allocate the best room for their shelter (Buhalis and Sinarta, 2019). Hospitality industries have adopted technical services or digital services to satisfy their customers within a short time.
Internet marketing, social media marketing, mobile communication, and computer system approaches are some service policies of the hospitality industry. The hospitality industry prepares foods, allocates rooms, and gives back-office services to customers. Hotels give luxuries and combo services to customers to attract them towards their industry (Williams and Levitt, 2019). Covid has changed the entire situation of hospitality industry, as hospitality industry has to provide contactless service to customers, which is much more expensive. Hence, companies are trying to provide excellent digital services to customers.
3. Impact of ICT on hospitality sector
3.1 Marketing segment
Demographic- Information technology influences a group of generation Z people to use cost-effective internet services from the hospitality sector. Demographic segment mainly deals with age, gender, and occupation of a group of people. Older people can review the quality of hospitality services through social media reviews, ratings, and discussions. People can understand whether a hotel is maintaining Covid protocols or not through reviews or videos of hotels. Every customer visits the website of a hotel before booking any rooms; in this case, information technology helps (Zsarnoczky, 2018). Hotels store necessary data regarding their hotels in cloud servers and it gives online notification to customers.
In traditional marketing, people had to travel to necessary places to collect information and find a proper place to stay. However, ICT influences a group of generation Z people or millennial to take reviewed services from hotels. Hotels show preferable services for families according to family size to customers using online channels. ICT systems collect different types of information of users such as marital status, financial status, and occupation from users through their website cookies (Williams and Levitt, 2019). All these thighs are beneficial for a hotel company to provide luxurious or deluxe services to them; moreover, it can help to choose a proper room for couples.
Psychographic- Hotels such as Marriott, Hilton, and the International hotel can provide offers according to attitudes, interests, lifestyles, and personal tents of customers. Information technology or social media channels help to gather such information using posts, links, and personal information of customers (Shamim et al. 2017). It might help in business-to-business marketing policies, for instance, front-end workers can give services to those people, which gives value to them.
Using social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, marketers can understand the requirements of customers. It helps to meet target market identification and reduces liability risks of an organization. Information technology is necessary to improve marketing functionality, penetration, and efficiency of a company (Shamim et al. 2017). It reshapes opportunities of a hotel and helps to implement robotics at their workplace.
Behavioural- Purchasing habits, spending habits, and brand interaction are some other crucial tools of marketing. ICT helps to understand spending behaviour of customers using their previous booking, service policies, and purchasing power. Hilton hotels provide cost-effective or customized services to customers on occasion. For instance, it gives offers to new couples after reviewing their previous online spending history. Backend staff gives parking and food services to customers after analysing their previous food history, where front-line officers allocate rooms as per their financial condition (Williams and Levitt, 2019). All these things are possible for ICT and people can generate a huge amount of money using this.
Geographic- Hotel marketers can know geographical location of a customer using a global positioning system; moreover, a hotel can start its new services in a crowded area to attract customers. ICT can help a company to know the effectiveness and characteristics of a particular place using Google (Law et al. 2018). Marketers can gather information regarding traveling system, traveling places, and transportation system of that particular place through social channels or online surveys.
3.2 Marketing mix
4p’s of marketing strategy
Place- Place is most vital part of hospitality industry as it denotes whether a company will create success or not. Every hospitality marketer has to establish their hotel in such a place where people visit most. Social media channels or ICT helps to gather information regarding a place; furthermore, it helps to make an online survey with the help of stakeholders to know the requirements of customers. Industry 4.0 technologies such as machine learning, IoT, and big data capture all information of a customer to develop business environments. Augmented reality helps to get real-time services through its online system, for instance, people can visit a place using AR without traveling there physically (Law et al. 2018). ICT helps to make decisions for customers using virtual personal assistance.
Promotion- Advertisement, personal selling, direct mail, digital marketing, and publicity come under promotional activities. Digital marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing are innovations of information technology. Companies arousing robotic base services, automatic cleaning systems, and hand gesture performance systems at their hotel to attract customers (Shamim et al. 2017). ICT helps in predictive data analysis, staffing, operational management system, and advertisement.
Chowbotics can be used to make a salad, it is a robotic service used by five-star hotels. ICT will be the most beneficial thing to promote services such as it helps in providing a product, services, and price-based information to customers using social media (Jones et al. 2017). Near-field communication systems help to provide location-based or customized services to users. Hotel industry can get a large number of potential investors using their social media profile such as LinkedIn profile.
Product- Hospitality industry gives food and lodging services to customers and ICT can help to improve their service policy. Different types of products such as gym rooms, cooking systems, and swimming are there in the hotel industry, which could be improved by ICT (Rather et al. 2019). As an instance, hospitality industry can involve Blockchain technology to make an online contactless payment in this Covid, they can use automatic sanitization tools (Ivanov, 2019). Companies are using artificial intelligence and three-dimensional food printing for customers.
Price- ICT impacts positively on price as marketers do not have to arrange physical campaigns to promote their products. The company can use an online pricing strategy to avoid contact in this pandemic situation. They can reduce price of foods using a 3-dimensional food printing system, additionally, promotional costs can be reduced through online social media promotion. Marketers can easily provide a service or price chart on their website to reduce overall mobile phone bills. Rate of calling can be decreased through artificial intelligence chatbot or personal virtual assistance systems (Goh and Jie, 2019).
3.3 Customer relationship management
ICT is the most beneficial system to satisfy customers as it gives automatic services to customers. For instance, an automatic food grinding system can easily attract customers to take services from a company. Overall rate of human interventions can be reduced through these services and customers can get offers on their services. As stated by Rahimi and Kozak (2017), website booking influences loyal customers, which use hotels for their meetings or business purpose. Customer relationship application helps in developing budget hotels and it helps to investigate performance of managers.
Cloud computing systems easily gather information from customers to show them different types of offers. Front-end managers can capture data of customers and they can use online cleaning systems for them. Hospitality sector uses an automatic cleaning bell to know cleaning system of a room (Dewnarain et al. 2019). Customers can also press the bell to be aware of the cleaning system; moreover, an automatic virus tracking system improves relationships with customers.
Customer relationship management is considered a technology that helps in managing all the operations to maintain healthy communication with their customers. According to Foltean et al. (2019), it has been observed that by enhancing the level of communication many organizations associated with hotels and restaurants can provide adequate help for their customers. In this way, customers can gain trust among their organizations and take part to grab some fast food or small tours in post-pandemic situations. Apart from that, with the enhancement of digital media, they need to focus on data security as well. In this way, lots of customers can get a motivation to join in their applications and continue their engagement.
3.4 Integrated Marketing Communication
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is considered a simple concept that helps to ensure all forms of communication and messages that seem to be directly linked with each other. IMC is considered as an innovative approach that helps to provide an innovative and seamless experience for their customers and enhances the brand image for different organizations. IMC comprises all sorts of communication starting from advertising, sales, direct marketing and in recent times by using social media. According to Adebiyi and Bello (2018), due to the advancement of technology to a huge extent, most of the hospitality sectors seemed to be using modern technology for the progress of the hospitality sectors gradually. The impact of COVID 19 has directly affected the hospitality sectors such as food and beverage, travel, tourism, lodging and others.
In the year 2019, it has been found that the hospitality sector contributes around £59.3 billion to the UK economy and around 3% of the total economic output. In the first half of 2020, the tourism sector is present at its peak and has the strength to contribute around 2.38 million jobs in the UK and 6.9% in the total UK employment (Commons Library. parliament, 2021). As the pandemic situation gets started economic output gets scattered by 90% in 2020 and 1.6 million people have lost their jobs. Standing in this situation there is only one way that can save the hospitality sectors is social media and digital marketing in the post-pandemic situation. After a tedious lockdown period in many cafes, pubs such as crussh fit food & juice bars, Mommi has delivered the news on the social media sites that they were reopening their shops (Crussh.com, 2021).
Social media has helped different fast food outlets and cafe shops to run their business by spreading the news of their reopening. A large number of people can know about the fact that shops were maintaining all the restrictions quite adequately. According to Hossain et al. (2017), the organizations posted some photos about their reopening by maintaining the social distance and sanitizing with regular intervals of time. Apart from that these cafes regularly post their photos and eliminate their outdoor sitting arrangement and make sitting arrangements indoors. Digital marketing helps them to deliver this news on their home pages and lots of customers can watch these facts within a short interval of time. The platform also provides an opportunity to suggest any person who can provide any recommendation that must be relevant to the situation. The organizations also maintained the government rules such as keeping a table left and serving in every alternate table (BBC.com, 2021). While using the toilets a customer needs to wear their masks which are appreciable.
The mentioned restrictions were posted on their social media sites and in this way it can help them to gain trust among their customers to grab their favorite products from their shops.
3.5 Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy is considered as the overall game of the business to reach their target consumers and turn them into customers of their associated products or services. Marketing strategy comprises the value proposition, key messages for their customers and maintains and needs to provide adequate assurance to join with the hospitality sectors. According to Ardani and Harianto (2021), apart from that, key customers can be invited by sending them messages from social media sites which helps to encourage them and continue their purchase. Involving all the segments of hospitality, it has been observed that the UK is the fastest-growing market and within 2025. However, its worth is seemingly more than about £257 billion and nearly contributes to 10% of the GDP in the UK (Condorferries, 2021). The main strategies that need to be accountable in this stage are as follows-
Market penetration strategy- Penetration strategy suggests that once an organization in the hospitality sector needs to sell their current products for their existing customers. In order to develop these things a plan needs to be prepared and digital and social media marketing is the ultimate solution for gaining support from a large group of people. In order to deal with this scenario, Starbucks has decided to remove a large number of gatherings around their shops and prepare a digital platform in which a customer can order and pay their bills with their car numbers in parking lots (Qsrmagazine.com, 2020). The employees from the coffee shops will deliver their favorite coffee and other side dishes for them in their cars which can provide a positive influence on the business and regains their profits.
Product development strategy- New products or any kind of positive approaches need to be developed from the hospitality sector and enhance their relationships with their customers quite well. All the hotels in the UK are closed due to the pandemic situation as no person dares to travel in these tough times. In the post-pandemic situation, The Savoy Hotel needs to become active in its digital media and needs to solve quarries from large groups of people (The Savoy London, 2021). As lots of people think about the proper sanitization process conducted in the hotels or not and try to avoid large hotels in this situation. A video needs to be prepared and needs to be uploaded to their social media sites about their activity in their conduct with proper sanitization and other related processes which helps them to grab the attention of travelers.
Diversification strategy- Diversification strategy suggests the new product or strategy that needs to be taken into account for enhancing their business in tough conditions. According to Shabani et al. (2018), it can be considered as one of the riskiest strategies and digital media marketing can help them to continue their business in the post-pandemic situation.
4. Recommendation
Needs for adequate sanitization process- The hospitality sector needs to be enhanced by maintaining proper rules and regulations from their government and performing their business operations. According to Laurie and Mortimer (2019), in case any traveler comes from outside needs to be conducted through a sanitization process and needs to measure their body temperatures for identifying any kind of irritation present within them. Apart from that many restaurants and especially hotels need to watch negative reports from their travelers and customers and provide permission for staying in the hotels and consume food by sitting in the restaurant
Always needs to maintain social distancing in food stores- Social distancing needs to be made and it must be maintained by their customers and keeps themselves safe from this virus. In front of their customer’s rooms or tables need to be sanitized and plates must be used for one-time use only. For example, in the case of a restaurant, no menu cards should be present. According to Hossain et al. (2017), a scanning item needs to be present in every table and by scanning from their smart phones the whole menu can be watched. In this way, no contact services can be provided and reduce the risk of getting affected by this virus.
The chefs and delivery persons need to wear gloves and check their temperature- The chefs and other delivery persons need to sanitize their hands regularly and measure their body temperature before starting their work. The above-mentioned scanning process can also help to order their favorite dishes and chefs directly get this order on their devices. The online payment facility is also an important element in this pandemic situation and enhancement of transferring funds without any physical contact.
Enhancement of online activities positively- The online activities need to be enhanced quite adequately which helps to provide adequate solutions for their customers and suggest they bring all the necessary documents with them. According to Adebiyi and Bello (2018), all the mentioned approaches need to be recorded and uploaded on the social media pages which help them to gain interest from their customers. Despite these tough situations, hotels, restaurants and other sectors need to provide adequate discounts for their customers which made them grab this opportunity and complete their desire.
5. Conclusion
Based on the above discussion it can be concluded that a rapport was prepared based on the information communication technology and highlight its facts on different organizations from hospitality sectors. The report comprises the characteristics of the selected industry and the impact of ICT in the case of marketing. In the study, an idea about market segmentation and marketing mix was illustrated properly. The hospitality sector needs to maintain healthy communication with their customers and for this reason, customer relationship management was delivered. In order to enhance their business, they need to take the help of digital and social media marketing for their advertisement and it reflects on the integrated marketing communications. In the final stage, some recommendations were provided which can help to run their business operations properly.
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