Praxis I: Marketing Audit
Magdalena Grand is a 200 room, 4-star luxury hotel situated on Tobago’s Southern coastline about five minutes from the island’s lone international airport. Magdalena Grand is a stand-alone hotel that rose like the proverbial phoenix. The hotel was in total disrepair and was closed down for some years until it received a $25 million capital injection, a name change (previously Tobago Hilton), and restored to service at the end of 2011.
Currently, the hotel has about 500 to 600 employees and can host up to 800 guests in its air-conditioned rooms. Tourism is a global business, and Magdalena faces the vicissitudes and vagaries of the fickle tourism industry. Richard Carrington is the Event and Sales Coordinator with whom I have scheduled an interview.
The information gleaned from this interview informed a substantial component of this paper. The marketing audit has been divided into three phases (a) macro environment audit, (b) task environment audit, and (c) marketing function and strategy audit. Each phase has a critical number of integrated stages that expanded the scope of the audit. The paper concluded with practical short-term and lon-term recommendations for improving the marketing effectiveness of the hotel’s marketing strategies.
Macro Environment Audit
Marketing audits are diagnostic tools that allow for the unearthing of critical information for determining the effectiveness of marketing efforts and the development of quality standards for improving or re-engineering marketing processes (da Gama, 2012). A macro environment audit is the first stage of a four-phase marketing audit as envisaged by Kotler and Keller (2012, p. 644). In the next section, I provided a macro environmental ...
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Yang, J., Flynn, J., & Anderson, K. (2014). E-business application in the hospitality industry: A case study. Communications of the IIMA, 3(1), 1-14. Retrieved from http://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/ciima/vol3/iss1/1
Urry, John, The tourist gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies 2nd Ed (London, 2002).
Couples looking for an indoor location for their nuptials will love the Magdalena Room at the Plaza de Magdalena. Set up to accommodate 50 to 229 guests, the room features a state-of-the-art audiovisual and lighting system. The room has an attached suite with a private entrance and bathroom. This area is perfect for the wedding party to use while preparing for the ceremony.
By the end of 1998 though, there was evidence of a crisis occurring. Customers and media pulled together to assist senior management partake in an internal audit to identify the problems and see if they could come to a solution. The purpose of this assignment is to construct a SWOT analysis, highlighting each of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that were highlighted in the internal audit. The SWOT analysis is contained within the marketing plan and is the third step in the marketing planning process, coming after the Marketing audit and before any assumptions. (Joisce, Ted (2002), Marketing Planning Lecture Notes – 14/10/02, Mission, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics)
Market research is vital to any business looking to expand into new markets. Global market research is a major function for organizations to facilitate marketing decisions outside their respectable country. Effective global market research requires analyzing market data, such as environmental factors, government regulations, needs of the target market, customer interests, price, and available resources. The following is a case study analysis of architectural firm Sperry/MacLennan (S/M), based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, which is seeking to expand their market in other countries. The analysis includes an overview of Sperry/MacLennan’s situation, identifies their key issues as well as ways in which to address those issues, and explains how market research is valuable in business.
In spite of having numerous structures in place to ensure a luxurious guest experience, the Oberoi Vanayvilas (OV) failed to provide a quality service to its hotel guest. To recover from this service failure, we recommend OV to sincerely apologize and ‘offer refund for the third night and a credit for the two nights for a future stay with additional hotel perks tobe used at OV within a year’ to the impacted guest. Main drivers for our recommendation are to convey a message that Oberoi sincerely cares about the customer inconvenience and wants its guest to revisit the hotel to win over the customer by its exemplary quality service.
“What is a marketing audit? Quite simply, it is a detailed analysis of the elements that constitute or influence a company’s efforts to profitably market its products- today and in future when both market and products may undergo radical change” ( John, Alexander, & Theodore, 1969). The marketing audit helps to understand the fundamentals of a company’s marketing planning process. Auditing is not only conducted not only at the planning stage and also conducted during various stages until the implementation of the marketing plan.
The hotel industry performs within a saturated market, driven by customer loyalty and competitive pricing to stand-out. This competitive nature makes it extremely important to capitalise on strengths while improving on
For this assignment I have carried out a job study for the Hotel Management industry.
The Hotel industry has become very important in the past years due to immense traveling and growth of international business. Hotel industry not only plays an important role in the life of people but as well as the economy of the country. Development and advancement in the Hotel industry have rapidly been taking place and especially since the rapid change in technology, it is very important for hotels to be promptly keeping up to date. When the hotel industry is spoken of, there are many famous hotels but one hotel company that has been outstanding in growth and other aspects of business, like in Leadership, Teamwork (Employee turnover), Motivation (Customer retention and satisfaction, Goals and objectives, (changing the way hotel business has worked), and Change within the company; structurally inside and physically outside, adding elements, like entertainment, gaming, and outdoor activities, is the Hilton Hotel Company.
Li, F 2007, What is E-business ?: how the Internet transforms organizations, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.
Tourism and Hospitality has developed rapidly and becoming extremely important to economy in the world. The income that several countries in the world receive from tourism industry can be reached to $1billion per year. In addition, Marketing is one of the most important factors that help and effect to tourism industry in many positive ways. Marketing evolved in the tourism industry since 1980. It promotes tourism industry by encouraging the tourists to travel at their destination with the strategy that made up to the tourist satisfaction. However, a marketing strategy does not have to be complex, in fact it should be a easily understood which ensure the advantage of marketing of the products and services to the tourist business to obtain positive
E-business is a wider concept that takes into account all the aspects of use of information technology in business. Apart from buying and selling, it also includes servicing customers, collaboration with business partners, and engages incorporation across business processes and communication within the organisation (Rowley, 2002)
The factors that have a great influence on marketing management, marketers’ business decision-making, and their relationship with customers include macro- and micro-environment, and the latter in turn includes the concept of so-called “4 P’s” (i.e., product, place, promotion, and price). Micro-environment is also referred to as “immediate environment” and stands for the factors that are literally “close” to a certain company: its suppliers, customers, intermediaries (e.g., advertising agencies), and competitors (“Marketing environment,” n.d.) Four P’s are also called “the marketing mix,” and their most widely used interpretation belongs to McCarthy (Blythe, 2008). The marketing mix indicates the four aspects of how to make your business profitable and yourself proficient as a marketing specialist. As Cannon (1992) pointed out, “The marketing mix is the set of controllable variables that the firm can use to influence the buyer’s response.” First, the business person needs to understand what the product of consumer’s desire is. It is obvious that “an undesired product” will not be sold. Producers, however, may invent something that consumers even did not expect to have but really wanted, at least, unconscious...
In the more economically developed countries (MEDCs), synonymous mainly with the industrialised countries of the northern hemisphere there, has been an explosion in the growth of leisure and tourism industry, which is now believed to be the worlds second largest industry in terms of money generated. In order to differentiate between leisure and tourism it should be recognised that leisure often involves activities enjoyed during an individual’s free time, whereas tourism commonly refers to organised touring undertaken on a commercial basis. Development in the two areas could be attributed to changing patterns in working lives within the last four decades. Generally, people now have more disposable wealth, work shorter hours, receive longer, paid annual leave, retire earlier and have greater personal mobility. In addition, according to Marshall & Wood (1995), the growth of the tourist industry per se can be associated, in part, with the concentration of capital; the emergence of diversified leisure based companies, sometimes within wider corporate conglomerates and often associated with particular airlines. Furthermore, the development of tourism can generate employment both directly, in jobs created in the hotels, restaurants etc, and indirectly, through expenditure on goods and services in the local area. Nevertheless, although the tourist industry is competitive, which essentially keeps down the cost of foreign travel, the success of tourism in any one area can be ‘influenced by weather, changing consumer tastes, demographics, economic cycles, government policy, not to mention international terrorism and other forms of conflict.’(1) Although such factors may have a detrimental affect on the economy of a popular tourist destination (or even tourism in general, in light of September 11th 2001), the consequence of tourism in general is often three fold: environmental, social and cultural, which in turn has prompted a search for new ‘friendly’ approaches that are less destructive.
Consequently, e-business and especially online shopping is crucial for retail stores. They should provide necessary infrastructure for selling their products online. By taking advantage of e-business not only they can get competitive advantage of online shopping, but the...