Entrepreneurial Theory: SME Marketing Environment in Hospitality

This report explores entrepreneurial theory within the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), focusing on the hospitality industry, with specific examples from 'The Cottage in the Wood' and 'The Haytor Hotel' in the UK. It examines the small business marketing environment, highlighting the impact of internal and external factors, including social, environmental, technological, and economic trends, particularly in light of the challenges posed by COVID-19 and the need for enhanced hygiene and safety measures. The report also discusses best practice methods and techniques in entrepreneurial marketing, such as customer service strategies, innovation, leveraging social media, utilizing vanity websites, email marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing, emphasizing their importance in attracting and retaining customers in a competitive market.

SME And Entrepreneurial
Theory

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
Best practice methods and techniques of entrepreneurial marketing..........................................4
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................9
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................10

INTRODUCTION
Being entrepreneurial can mean knowing market industry inside out and also to
understand the concept of strategies used to create new opportunities. It is important to share new
ideas, learn from failures and grow experiences. The present report will be based on
entrepreneurial theory used by small and medium enterprises. Furthermore, it will provide
detailed information about small business marketing environment and issues faced by new
ventures.
Hospitality industry is the fastest growing industry in the world adopting various strategies
to satisfy the requirement and needs of customers. This industry has been categorized in various
fields such as food and beverage service, accommodation, travel and tourism, event planning and
many more. Hospitality industry with the help of hotels are just booming and growing rapidly.
This is the reason behind choosing hotel industry because it has enhanced the tourism sector and
created great employment opportunities for people. The chosen SME are ‘The cottage in the
wood and The Haytor hotel situated in UK. Both the hotels provide accommodation services
such as cozy room with beautiful view, food and great customer service.
Small and medium sized enterprises are known as independent companies which employ
fewer than a given number of staff members. This type of enterprise employ fewer than 250
employees and maintain assets, revenues and staffs below a certain threshold.
Small business marketing environment
Marketing environment is all about internal and external factors that can impact the
company’s operations and decisions indirectly or directly. Small businesses need to focus on
these factors such as social trends, environmental trends, changing technology, changing policies
tax rates and economic conditions. By understanding the concept of these elements, organisation
can easily able to find out its strengths and weaknesses and deal with threats by adopting new
opportunities in the market.
In the present report, selected organisation: The Haytor hotel provides various types of
accommodation services such as rooms, bars, food and beverage and peaceful ambiance.
The cottage in the wood provides beautiful views of the forest valley, beautiful rooms, tasty
food meals and maintaining hygiene and safety for the better experience. both of them provide
guests with an enjoyable experience. The managers of the hotel ensure each individual guest is
experiencing benefits and facilities. Due to covid-19, the hotels has to face a lot of challenges

and take hygiene and safety precautions. This has created pressure on hotels to follows rules and
regulation strictly to keep the ambience safe for customers. They have to invest more in safety
measures to keep business environment safe (Amjad, Rani and Sa'atar, 2020). Both of the hotels
are following precautions guidelines such as regular hand sanitizer, maintaining high traffic areas
and covering nose and mouth with mask.
Best practice methods and techniques of entrepreneurial marketing
The hospitality industry uses elements from traditional management theory as well as
effective marketing strategy and methods to satisfy customers. As per the current trends the firm
focus on practice that provide benefit to business and clients both. It includes promoting
employee productivity, improving service quality and customer experience and branding. Keep
updating best practices in this industry is important otherwise business can lose its market
position. Various types of practices reflect social and economic trends and seek to decrease the
way in which hotels are considered interchangeable by clients.
Customer service play a vital role in the success of hotel industry, especially during the
peak season. In order to attract more customers, the hoteliers are using effective ways and
methods to attract guests. If hotel is not providing enough facilities to customer, they may find
themselves losing repeat customers. Therefore, it is important that the manager of the firm must
follow all the basic practices to improve customer service. Timely response is necessary when it
comes to customer satisfaction. While serving food it is essential to respond quickly then only
hotelier can keep customer happy (Gilmore and et.al., 2020). In order to increase traffic, the hotel
must use effective strategies and must re-evaluate those strategies for hospitality marketing.
Before anything else, it is necessary to start with understanding audience and their needs. This
can be done through survey and feedbacks from customer and know about their taste, preference
and habits. After that, Greeting and politeness is the another step nowadays, hotels are using to
attract customers. The warm welcome plays an important role in setting the tone for guest’s
overall experience. thus, the manager of haytor hotel have provide training to their staff members
to start with a warm welcome along with politeness.

Communication skills- communication play an important role in customer service
because it is necessary to listen carefully about the concern of guests regarding comfort stay.
With the help of excellent communication skills, the hotelier can enhance a guest’s experience as
it shows that staff are listening to them, respecting their concern and valuing their feedback. By
adopting effective communication skills, The cottage in the wood have increase customer loyalty
and experience. Similarly, The Haytor hotel keep communicate with their guests and maintain a
consistent level of guest service with the help of its talented staff.
Knowing customer needs- This is the best way to provide effective customer service, by
using survey method hotels are tracking trend related to guest experience in order to achieve
optimal customer satisfaction. While providing service, both of the hotel is focusing on customer
habits.
Entrepreneurial marketing
It is proactive identification of opportunities for retaining and acquiring potential clients
through various approaches such as innovation, risk management, value creation and resource
leveraging. Basically, this marketing often starts with an idea, method or techniques and then
trying to find a potential market. In today’s world, a growing awareness of the importance of
entrepreneurship and innovation to marketing has led to more competition in the hospitality
sector. It can be used by any small or medium business owner looking to market their service so
that customer can get whatever they want. Since this type of marketing strategy does not require
high amount of money or as much capital as other types of marketing (Fard and Amiri, 2018).
Majorly, this strategy is used by businesses who have limited operating budget but wants to
promote its brand. Since this marketing need experience people and knowledge about services
provided by competitors. By using entrepreneurial marketing, the SMEs can easily achieve
success related to marketing activities. There are various types of marketing used by industries to
satisfy clients. It includes risk taking, innovation and being proactive. By using marketing
campaigns, the firms highlight its greatest strengths while emphasizing their value to the clients.
For start-ups, it is beneficial to create campaigns to promote their service that cost little
time and money. By having talented and skilled workers in the hotel, one can successful achieve
campaign goals. The major drawback of this marketing is: it does not always work effectively
and also it is not possible to reach lots of people at same time. However, hotel who use this
method are not having enough budget to spread their business via other means.

For Small business it is a great idea to start by creating a marketing campaigns before
implementing any decisions. by having this one can easily increase interest of customer in the
service.
Innovation- no matter the type of business the company is managing, potential guests of
that property will be looking at hotel online before choosing to make their reservation. As a
result, one of the best strategies hotel industry are using involves leveraging the technology. In
addition, businesses are also focusing on innovative ideas, services and customer services to
stand out from competitors (Alqahtani and Uslay, 2020). With the support of online videos,
social media such as Facebook and Instagram and email marketing, they make pitch to attract
more customers. These strategies are used in a really effective manner in order to produce best
results related to hospitality. In order to develop a competitive advantage, the cottage in the
wood provide free high speed internet. While on the other hand, Haytor hotel provide amenities
such as private check-in check-out online, free Wi-Fi and maintaining safety measures.
Support of social media- while many businesses may not see the advantages of having
social media support. But it is one of the top strategies used by hotel industry to increase hotel
revenue, sales and attract more people. To be successful, it is necessary to utilize social media
such as online marketing, Facebook, websites, Instagram. By sharing beautiful photos, videos
and details about hotel facilities, the company can easily attract guests. Setting goals and
maintaining a conversation with guests will help build brand awareness. In fact, it will allow the
hotel to shift their messaging to target those people who are more interested in staying and
enjoying guest service. It has been said that the more hotelier able to catch attention of travellers,
the higher chance they will have of making connections with them.
Use a vanity website- by using this method, the hotel industry can help drive guests to
hotel and motivate them to book reservation. Which in turn helps them to maximize revenue,
sales and increase customer satisfaction too. Nowadays, people are spending more time on social
media via mobile phone plus internet (Fard and Amiri, 2018). The hotels are grasping this
opportunity and do tie-ups with digital marketing companies. Along with this, SEO will be
helpful to increase hotel search ability in the world of technology. It allows customers to search
for various options while visiting hotel’s profile, images and videos. In addition to this, websites

are a flexible marketing strategy for hotel industry, as they are able to cross promote their brand
name and make effective advertisements about offers and discounts.
Email marketing- it is the another best practice or method utilize by hotels to reach out
to guests. Email play a vital role as it is a powerful tool or technique to meet the expectation of
people. Reaching out to customers after they have stayed or experienced service is important for
hotel. So the cottage in the wood is focusing on reviewing the guest experience. with the help of
email marketing, the hotel can send newsletters about upcoming offers, events and promotions.
Word of mouth- it has been noted that if the customer is happy with hotel service they
are going to tell other about it and share experience. it is important to take care of customer and
do what is best for them. To attract and satisfy clients, the hotel must try to be popular on social
media by sharing images and videos. This is the best way to keep growing business in the world
full of competition especially hospitality sector. In the modern world, where people provide
information and exchange their experience with other, it is important to give people a reason to
talk about brand. For example- nowadays, people prefer to spend some quality time with their
closed ones such as family and friends. Before making any reservation they first review
company’s profile and services provided by them. They will go through all the positive and
negative comments of people. As per the views of (Polas and Raju, 2021), nothing influence
customer more than recommendation or suggestion from a family, friends and relative.
word of mouth marketing happens when clients who visit hotel and talk about facilities
provided by that particular hotel to their relatives, family and to others. In today’s social business
environment, guest always trust their closed ones such as friends, relatives and family. People
mostly influence by the social trends and their even believe suggestions from friends and family.
It is the most popular form of advertisements businesses are using in a most effective way
(Sadiku-Dushi, Dana and Ramadani, 2019). Plus, nowadays, people can view and easily see
recent experiences when searching about hotel and their facilities, by reviewing those comments
they make their decisions whether to stay or not. Word of mouth is influential in the hospitality
sector, as many travellers use reviews to gauge what other people have encountered when
visiting hotel. According to recent survey taken, around 28% of customer believe that word of
mouth is the most essential element in increasing brand promotion and negative comments also
impacted many business operations. While 64% of the marketing executive feel that this is the
most effective way of marketing to attract more guests. For example- one happy guest can

positively influence other people to buy the same service or product. By having social media
support, the cottage in the wood can increase the customer base. The major disadvantage of this
method: people naturally wants to believe whatever their friend and family member might have
experienced. Instead of searching and reviewing advertisement they always trust their closed
ones. On the negative side of this method, a single negative recommendation can impact the
reputation of brand whereas on the positive side, it can be a reason for successful business.
Types of word of mouth marketing
Buzz marketing- it is all about taking support of high profile media or news channels in
order to influence people to talk about brand. This is the most effective strategy used by many
hotels to attract customer to talk about brand service (Fink and et.al., 2020). By having this
method, Haytor hotel can influence the choices and taste of guests. For using this techniques, the
hotel has to make investment so that they can hire or tie-ups with social media influencer.
Influence marketing- it is the technique used by hotel industry to identify key
communities, influencer who can easily influence people to talk about service, this can be paid
partnerships. By having this, cottage in the wood can target market to turn them into its repeated
customer.
Viral marketing- in this modern business environment, customers are getting information
via viral videos, images and documentary films (Morrish and Jones, 2020). Viral marketing is all
about creating informative and engaging content, articles or documents which can be intended to
be handed together in a trends. By having this method, hotel can share content related to services
to its customer. It has been said that the most important factors of this marketing campaigns is to
develop content in such a way that is not only motivate people but also enhance their interest that
it must be shared with relatives or closed ones. This method is tends to be subtle about its way of
presenting related to company’s services.

CONCLUSION
To conclude, the word of mouth is the best and effective method because it totally relies
upon satisfied clients telling other people about their service experience at hotels. By having
entrepreneurial marketing, the hotel can choose which type of campaign works best for their
business promotions and customer satisfaction without investing more. With the help of online
customer reviews, clients can have ideas about services provided by hotels. Although, by
implementing one or more of the above mentioned strategies, the hotels can get people to talk
about products or services. But it is necessary to focus on customer satisfaction and customer
service. The hotels need to make sure how they are going to serve their audience requirements
and gain competitive advantage by adopting new technologies and advanced innovation method.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Alqahtani, N. and Uslay, C., 2020. Entrepreneurial marketing and firm performance: Synthesis
and conceptual development. Journal of Business Research. 113. pp.62-71.
Amjad, T., Rani, S. H. B. A. and Sa'atar, S. B., 2020. Entrepreneurship development and
pedagogical gaps in entrepreneurial marketing education. The International Journal of
Management Education. 18(2). p.100379.
Fard, M. H. and Amiri, N. S., 2018. The effect of entrepreneurial marketing on halal food SMEs
performance. Journal of Islamic Marketing.
Fink, M. and et.al., 2020. Effective entrepreneurial marketing on Facebook–A longitudinal
study. Journal of business research. 113. pp.149-157.
Gilmore, A. and et.al., 2020. Four questions of entrepreneurial marketing education:
Perspectives of university educators. Journal of Business Research. 113. pp.189-197.
Morrish, S. C. and Jones, R., 2020. Post-disaster business recovery: An entrepreneurial
marketing perspective. Journal of Business Research. 113. pp.83-92.
Polas, M. R. H. and Raju, V., 2021. Technology and entrepreneurial marketing decisions during
COVID-19. Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management. 22(2). pp.95-112.
Sadiku-Dushi, N., Dana, L. P. and Ramadani, V., 2019. Entrepreneurial marketing dimensions
and SMEs performance. Journal of Business Research. 100. pp.86-99.
Online
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