Roles and Responsibility of Marketing in Hospitality Industry

HOSPITALITY MARKETING
ESSENTIALS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
LO1..................................................................................................................................................1
P1 Roles and responsibility of marketing function......................................................................1
P2 Interrelationship of marketing with other functional units.....................................................3
LO2..................................................................................................................................................4
P3 Comparative analysis of organization's marketing mix to achieve organizational objectives
......................................................................................................................................................4
LO3..................................................................................................................................................7
P4 Developing marketing plan to meet organization marketing objectives................................7
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................10
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................11

INTRODUCTION
Marketing is a set of activities and processes for creating, communicating and offering
value to customers based on the customer's needs and wants. Hospitality marketing is also
marketing in the direction of increasing revenue of the hospitality industry. It takes into account
how different segments of the hospitality industry such as restaurants, amusement parks, hotel,
resorts use marketing techniques to promote its product ad services. Currently hospitality
industry is moving at a fast pace, there are over 3.5 million people employed in hospitality
industry and expected to be 6 million by 2020 in UK. In this report, Marriott Hotel, London is
taken, which is a multinational hospitality company with broad hotel portfolio. This report
covers roles and responsibility of marketing and its interrelation with other functional units in
hospitality industry, ways organization has used 7Ps of marketing mix in order to achieve
business objectives and at last development of strategic marketing plan for the business to
achieve marketing objectives.
LO1
P1 Roles and responsibility of marketing function
Marketing plays a crucial role in hospitality industry for maximizing a hotel's revenue.
This can be accomplished by comping up with different programs to make profitable use of its
accommodation and facilities. For this marketing personnel is appointed who takes the
responsibility for coordinating and promoting marketing activities. Some important marketing
role and responsibilities are described below.
Conduct market research: Customer chooses hotel and hotel services for a wide range of
reasons. Marketing manager conducts a research and identifies the factors that makes customer
choose a particular hotel and this requires a deep and extensive research. Timely review and
monitoring of customer reviews on the hotel website also helps it to identify its strength and
weaknesses (Rather and Sharma, 2017). Marriott hotel is a well recognized organization. It
conducts customer feedback in the form of face to face or in follow-up calls. Marriott hotel
tracks its customers feedback through Guest satisfaction Survey (GSS) which is conducted on an
ongoing basis. This survey helps Marriott to evaluate the hotel, its staff and services and works
on the areas of improvement which helps in maintaining a positive relationship with its
customers. It also reviews the tours and travel industry to identify the future trends which may
affect the hotel. So, Marriott has worked successfully on this of marketing.
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Increasing customer awareness: It is the responsibility of marketing manager to make it easy
for customers find its hotel. If the potential customer is unaware about the services offered in the
hotel, customers won't purchase it or look after it. Marketer needs to make sure that information
available about the hotel's product and services are up to date and easily available to the
customers. To increase brand awareness, marketing manager should do advertisements on
relevant travel sites and online booking sites in order to reach target audience. Marriott hotel has
designed a high impact campaigns and advertisements to specific target customers segment to
generate revenue and brand awareness and display a good public image (Šeric, Gil-Saura and
Ozretić-Došen, 2015). By increasing brand awareness has helped Marriott in fulfilling its one of
the objective of customer awareness and brand positioning.
Promoting the services: Promotion is an important part of hotel marketing. Timely promotion
can help in increasing occupancy during low bookings or non-holiday season or time. This can
be done through conducting special events like gourmet events or offering incentive such as
extra accommodation, especial services etc. which is the most prominent method as it can help in
attracting more guests. Hotel can target businesses also by making its hotel attractive for
conducting business meetings, conferences, seminars etc. by providing them conference room.
Marriott has broad range of hotel portfolio and services based on the customer needs and wants.
It has used terrific advertisement campaigns to attract its customers to spend holidays in its
hotels and take advantage of its services.
Building customer relationship: A good customer relationship is essential for the growth of the
business. There are number of ways to establish relationship and one such is customer loyalty
program that rewards customers based on the days spend or services availed in the hotel which
can be utilized by the customers in next bookings (Nieves and Diaz-Meneses, 2016). Marketing
manager needs to target the corporate guests or individual guest who require regular meeting
accommodation in large number. Marriott hotel follow up on its customers on an ongoing basis
to take corrective steps to meet with the needs of the customers. Also, it sends offers and latest
news about its hotel to its customers which creates a sense of belongingness to the customers
with the hotel. In this way Marriott hotel maintains its relationship with its customers.
Expanding Business: After effective execution of above roles, brings the opportunity for
expansion of the business. It is the responsibility of marketing manager to carry out a plan to
expand the business. It will help in global presence of the hotel and attract more customers.
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