There are any numbers of factors that affect a consumer’s decision making. Travel professionals not only have to appeal to the ego of the consumer with a Hotel’s service that makes them feel important, they must also deal with outside influencers – like friends, family, colleagues, and others. Understanding consumer behavior is one of the top jobs for all marketers. To sell a service, one must understand their consumer and what motivates them.
There are a number of strategies that can be employed to obtain loyalty from consumers. As all business people know, it is cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one. However, loyalty in today’s competitive environment is hard to come by. By studying psychological factors that play into a consumer’s loyalty and commitment to a hotel and its service, programs to garner that loyalty have a better chance of succeeding. A traveler will earn points or rewards by staying at the Grande Bretagne Hotel. Rewarding repeat travelers with discounts or a points system whereby the traveler can earn points toward extra amenities or prizes like travel books, digital cameras, etc. can be as effective as expensive mailings or other marketing campaigns designed to retain Hotel’s customers.
Advertisers often show how the benefits of their products aid consumers as they perform certain roles. Typically the underlying message of this promotional approach is to suggest that using the advertiser’s product will help raise one’s status in the eyes of others while using a competitor’s product may have a negative effect on status.
Motivation relates to human’s desire to achieve a certain outcome. Many internal factors we have already discussed can affect a customer’s desire to achieve a certain outcome but there are others. For instance, when it comes to making purchase decisions customers’ motivation could be affected by such issues as financial position, time constraints, overall value, and perceived risk.
Motivation is also closely tied to the concept of Involvement, which relates to how much effort the consumer will exert in making a decision. Highly motivated consumers will want to get mentally and physically involved in the purchase process. Not all services have a high percentage of highly involved customers but marketers who market services that may lead to high level of consumer involvement should prepare options that will be attractive to this group. For instance, marketers should make it easy for consumers to learn about hotel’s services (e.g., information on website, free video preview).
Marketing plan
The marketing plan accurately describes the market, customers, service and the competition. Marketing plan plays an important role in the hospitality industry. It is essential for the development, growth and sustenance of a business.
For the first few years the Grande Bretagne Hotel will need to be aggressive in attracting new guests. The marketing strategy is subject to change upon guest feedback and surveys.
The hotel currently has the following business mix.
| Market Segment | Percentage |
| Rack Walk-in | 6 |
| Conferences/meetings | 11 |
| Corporate | 36 |
| Leisure | 28 |
| Airline Crew | 8 |
| Events | 11 |
- New visitors traveling to the area;
- Middle- and upper-income bracket;
- Returning visitors to the area;
- Businesses needing to hold small overnight planning and strategy sessions;
- Area wedding parties.
The Grande Bretagne Hotel will aim to attract business guests and their partners needing to hold planning or strategy sessions away from the office in order to even out revenues throughout the week.
The Grande Bretagne Hotel will maintain a front office staff member throughout the night so guests are able to get answers to any question or service when they need it. This flexibility is especially attractive to the business traveler. Clients will be able to contact the Grande Bretagne Hotel by telephone, fax, and e-mail.
By giving careful consideration to customer responsiveness, The Grande Bretagne Hotel’s goal will be to meet and exceed every service expectation of its hotel and lounge services. Its guests can expect quality service and a total quality management (TQM) philosophy throughout all levels of the staff.
Task 2 – Questionnaire Design and Fieldforce Instructions
A valid questionnaire measures what it claims to measure. In reality, many fail to do this. For example, a self completion questionnaire that seeks to measure people's food intake may be invalid because it measures what they say they have eaten, not what they have actually eaten. Similarly, responses on questionnaires that ask general practitioners how they manage particular clinical conditions differ significantly from actual clinical practice. An instrument developed in a different time, country, or cultural context may not be a valid measure in the group you are studying.
Reliable questionnaires yield consistent results from repeated samples and different researchers over time. Differences in results come from differences between participants, not from inconsistencies in how the items are understood or how different observers interpret the responses. A standardized questionnaire is one that is written and administered so all participants are asked the precisely the same questions in an identical format and responses recorded in a uniform manner. Standardizing a measure increases its reliability.
Just because a questionnaire has been piloted on a few of your colleagues, used in previous studies, or published in a peer reviewed journal does not mean it is either valid or reliable. The detailed techniques for achieving validity, reliability, and standardization are beyond the scope of this series. If you plan to develop or modify a questionnaire yourself, you must consult a specialist text on these issues.
There are two main objectives in designing a questionnaire:
To maximize the proportion of subjects answering our questionnaire - that is, the response rate.
To obtain accurate relevant information for our survey.
To maximize our response rate, we have to consider carefully how we administer the questionnaire, establish rapport, explain the purpose of the survey, and remind those who have not responded. The length of the questionnaire should be appropriate. In order to obtain accurate relevant information, we have to give some thought to what questions we ask, how we ask them, the order we ask them in, and the general layout of the questionnaire.
As discussed in last month's issue, there are three potential types of information:
Information we are primarily interested in-that is, dependent variables.
Information which might explain the dependent variables-that is, independent variables.
Other factors related to both dependent and independent factors which may distort the results and have to be adjusted for - that is, confounding variables.
Let us take as an example a national survey to find out students' factors predicting the level of certain knowledge, skills, and attitudes at the end of their undergraduate medical course. The dependent factors include the students' level of relevant knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The independent factors might include students' learning styles, GCSE and A level grades, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, etc. Confounding variables might include the types and quality of teaching in each medical school.
Sometimes, additional questions are used to detect the consistency of the subject's responses. For example, there may be a tendency for some to tick either "agree" or "disagree" to all the questions. Additional contradictory statements may be used to detect such tendencies.
There are several ways of administering questionnaires. They may be self administered or read out by interviewers. Self administered questionnaires may be sent by post, email, or electronically online. Interview administered questionnaires may be by telephone or face to face.
Advantages of self administered questionnaires include:
- Cheap and easy to administer.
- Preserve confidentiality.
- Can be completed at respondent's convenience.
- Can be administered in a standard manner.
Advantages of interview administered questionnaires include:
- Allow participation by illiterate people.
- Allow clarification of ambiguity.
The exact method of administration also depends on who the respondents are. For example, university lecturers may be more appropriately surveyed by email; older people by telephone interviews; train passengers by face to face interviews.
Piloting and evaluation of questionnaires. Given the complexity of designing a questionnaire, it is impossible even for the experts to get it right the first time round. Questionnaires must be pretested - that is, piloted - on a small sample of people characteristic of those in the survey. In a small survey, there might be only pretesting of the drafted questionnaire. In a large survey, there may be three phases of piloting. In the first phase we might ask each respondent in great detail about a limited number of questions: effects of different wordings, what they have in mind when they give a particular answer, how they understand a particular word, etc. In the second phase the whole questionnaire is administered by interviewers. Analysis of the responses and the interviewers' comments are used to improve the questionnaire. Ideally, there should be sufficient variations in responses among respondents; each question should measure different qualities - that is, the responses between any two items should not be very strongly correlated - and the non-response rate should be low. In the third phase the pilot test is polished to improve the question order, filter questions, and layout.
Usually respondents spent an average of 33 minutes answering a variety of questions about their «backgrounds, tastes, and their shopping and media consumption habits».
The Grande Bretagne Hotel most (8,852) came from Britain, followed by the U.S. (3,747), and Norway (3,244). The fewest responses were from Venezuela (197), Portugal (175), and Austria (90). And responses was split pretty equally between genders: 51 % of survey takers were female, 49 % male. Most respondents were in the 13- to 15-year-old age group (60 %), followed by 16- to 18-year-olds (19 %). Only 12 % were 12 and under (which is odd since players are supposed to be at least 13 to play), and 10 % were 19 and older.
Task 3 - Information for Marketing Decisions
Market research consists of two primary categories: primary data and secondary data.
Primary data is made of information obtained through focus groups, surveys, and observation.
Secondary data is provided by another group, such as the Census Bureau, a professional association, or think tank. A problem with using secondary data sources is their information may not relate to your target market or geographic area.
Obtaining primary data yourself is time consuming and can be expensive; but how much money have you or your company wasted on advertising or activities that ended up not generating the business you thought they would?
There is need to have some primary data in customers’ buying patterns. If there is no a system that provides you with mechanisms to breakdown data into various groups, then there is need to begin investigating how to acquire one.
As the hotel began to study expenses, it discovered that managers were over-scheduling employees on the weekends and even paying overtime to deal with the expected increase in customers that marketing was driving in. Naturally most business would come in on the weekend and the facility would staff up on Friday afternoons and evenings. When check-in data was examined, management discovered that most visitors were checking in on Saturday morning. By making scheduling adjustments and cross-training employees, the hotel was able to use fewer employees to handle the influx of customers. More employees were given time off on Friday nights, raising employee morale which resulted in improved customer service. Soon, expenses were down, revenue was up, and most importantly, profits were up.
None of that would have happened if management didn’t take the time to look at the statistics, analyze the data, and make adjustments.
Surveys can also provide important information a business can use to improve the customer experience, the employee experience, or extend the brand through additional product offerings.
Surveys are labor intensive since they take a bit of time to create, administer, then compile and analyze the data. If spending a couple of thousand dollars can lead to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or more in revenue, it’s money well spent. The same can be said if that investment saves you from spending even more money to invest in something that your customers don’t want (and remember: Customers don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.).
There are lots of ways to conduct a survey. The method used depends on what data you’re trying to obtain and what customer segment or segment of potential customers (or former customers) you’re trying to reach.
For example, if you own a bricks-and-mortar store, you can ask your customers to complete a quick comment or survey card while you package their purchases. Of course, they may not be as entirely honest as they could be since you’re standing in front of them and, assuming you read the card right after they walk away it’s not anonymous (you could have them drop it in a box for an extra level of anonymity).
You could also mail surveys to customers (with a self-addressed, stamped envelope or SASE), try phone surveys (you can just imagine how hard they are to conduct), or email surveys. All of these techniques have pros and cons and we can’t stress enough that the method you pick should be the best method to be used with the population you’re targeting. If your customers are in a certain age group who are not heavy internet users, an internet-based survey administered through email would be a mistake.
Focus groups can be a great source of information but you’ll need to consider how you recruit the participants, what characteristics (demographic and psychographic) should your participants possess or not possess, and what will you give them as an incentive to attend.
Only the rarest of the rare will participate in a focus group just because it sounds like a fun thing to do. Even surveys need some level of incentive to increase participation. Including a SASE is a bare minimum. No one is going to provide the envelope and postage to complete a survey for your business.
The peculiar nature of the hotel business may compel the management to think short term about day-to-day problems or the next-meal periods, as the room day is a perishable item. The room occupancy perishes on the expiry of the day.
Overall, the environment appears very positive for the Grande Bretagne Hotel. The forces driving market demand, mainly economic and geographical, are strong, with more people staying closer to home for shorter getaway trips and their comfort level of visiting London. On the negative side, there is competition, and it will take a while for the Grande Bretagne Hotel to get “established” in its market niche.
Bibliography
1. The International Hotel Industry: Sustainable Management by Timothy L.G. Lockyer, December 2007.
2. Hotel Operations Management by David K. Hayes, Ninemeier, October 2006.
3. Opportunities in Hotel and Motel Management Careers by Shepard Henkin, March 2008.
4. Hotel Front Office Management by James A. Bardi March 2006, Hardcover, 4th edition
5. Hotel Management And Operations by Denney G. Rutherford, Michael J. O'Fallon Ph.D. (Editor), February 2006, Paperback, 4th edition
6. Hotel Operations Management by David K. Hayes, Jack D. Ninemeier January 2006, Hardcover, 2nd edition
7. A Survival Guide for Hotel and Motel Professionals by Alan Gelb, Karen Levine, October 2004, Paperback
8. www.equitymaster.com
9. www.csupomona.edu
10. www.icbe.ie
11. www.hants.gov.
12. www.hotelinteractive.com
13. www.georgiacenter.uga.edu/is/mr/learning_objectives.phtml