Learning objectives
At the end of this chapter the reader will be able to:
- Identify the unique challenges of marketing tourism.
- Discuss the importance of the steps involved in the development of a marketing plan.
- Be able to define and correctly use the following terms: marketing product, orientation, marketing orientation, profit margin, brand loyalty, marketing strategy grid, unique selling proposition/point, life span, geographic selectivity, cost-per-contact, cooperative advertising, selling orientation, intermediaries, channel of distribution, cognitive dissonance, promotional theme, noise level, pass-along rate, market selectivity, timing flexibility.
Introduction
Marketing is the sum total of the activities involved in getting products and services from producer to customer. This means ensuring that the right product is developed at the right price and promoted through the right places to produce a satisfied customer at a profit for the producer. In the case of tourism, a producer might be a destination, an airline, or a hotel, for example.
Marketing challenges
The marketing of tourism is different from marketing in the manufacturing industries because of the special characteristics of tourism.
- Tourist supply cannot be easily changed to meet changing tastes. This puts increased pressure on planners to make the right development and marketing decisions.
- Tourist demand is highly elastic. This means that changes in tourist income will produce a proportionately larger change in the demand for tourism.
- Tourist services are consumed on the spot. There is no opportunity to maintain an inventory of goods to compensate for soft periods of demand. There is constant pressure to sell every room, every seat, and every ticket every day because the sale that is lost today is lost forever.
- The tourist product is an amalgam of services—a plane seat, a hotel room, restaurant meals, sightseeing tours, etc. Lack of service in any one of these areas can ruin the entire vacation experience for the tourist. Any one producer lacks control over tourist satisfaction for the entire vacation.
Orientation. In addition to being a series of activities, marketing is also a way of looking at a business—namely through the eyes of the tourist. Historically, tourism marketing has been product oriented. The focus of the marketing effort was to provide the best beaches, the best rooms, etc, and to assume that, because these were the "best", tourists would automatically visit. This "product orientation" focuses on providing a "better" (as defined by the producer) product. Where there is more demand than supply, such an orientation might work.
However, when supply (of destinations, airline, hotels) is greater than demand, the focus tends to switch to a selling orientation—where the emphasis is on convincing tourists to visit a particular destination. The trouble here is that the focus is on the needs of the producer to sell rather than on the needs of the tourist to buy.
A marketing orientation focuses on the tourist: "What does the tourist want? Can I provide it?" This orientation, or way of looking at the business, sees the vacation through the eyes of the tourist.
Decisions regarding what to provide (product), what to charge (price), how to advertise our message (promotion), and how to communicate with the tourist (place) are taken with the tourist firmly in mind.
In tourism we are dealing with a "living product", a destination. While the focus of our efforts must be on satisfying the tourist, the physical, social, and cultural environment of the destination must be protected. Destinations that satisfy tourist needs to the exclusion of their own soon end up having lost the very thing that made them attractive in the first place. The task for the marketer is to satisfy the needs of the tourist while protecting the integrity of the destination.
Previous chapters have covered product and pricing issues within the context of the development of tourism. This chapter will focus on promoting tourist destinations and services, and the two chapters that follow will zero in on the fourth "p"—place, or, as it is referred to in tourism, the channels of distribution.
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