Marketing Communications in Tourism and Hospitality

Scott McCabe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136437410
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The rapidly changing context of the modern tourism and hospitality industry, responding to the needs of increasingly demanding consumers, coupled with the fragmenting nature of the marketing and media environment has led to an increased emphasis on communications strategies. How can marketing communication strategies meet the changing and challenging demands of modern consumers, and maintain a company's competitive edge? Marketing Communications in Tourism and Hospitality: concepts, strategies and cases discusses this vital discipline specifically for the tourism and hospitality industry. Using contemporary case studies such as South African Tourism, Travelocity and Virgin Trains, it explains and critiques the practice and theory in relation to this industry. Combining a critical theoretical overview with a practical guide to techniques and skills, it illustrates the role that communications play in the delivery and representation of hospitality and tourism services, whilst developing practical skills needed to understand, interpret and implement communications strategies within a management context. This systematic and cohesive text is essential reading for hospitality management students, and an invaluable resource for marketing practitioners in this growing area.

CHAPTER 1 Positioning Marketing Communications for Tourism and Hospitality

DOI: 10.4324/9780080941813-1

Learning Objectives

At the end of this chapter, you will be able to

• Define tourism and hospitality marketing communications.
• Understand the importance of communications in tourism and hospitality services.
• Describe the changing role of marketing communications in the tourism and hospitality system.

Introduction – Defining Marketing Communications for Tourism and Hospitality

Marketing communications forms a key aspect of the delivery of tourism and hospitality services. This sector is heavily dependent on marketing because of the industries special characteristics as services. However, marketing communications is a great deal more than simply about advertising. Getting the right messages to the right people is perhaps one of the most important factors in determining the success of this sector. Indeed marketing communications forms its own sub-field of study within the discipline of marketing. And yet there are few textbooks that focus specifically on marketing communications for services, and none of them that look in detail into the communications issues, theories and strategies facing the contemporary tourism and hospitality sector. This is despite the fact that this sector is an experiential services sector which relies so heavily on ‘representations’. Representations can be described as impressions, images and depictions about the experiences or about what might be expected from service providers. Although there has been a great deal of academic attention given to the various dimensions of marketing in tourism and hospitality services within the business and management literature, and within sociology on the semiotics of representations of tourist brochures, there has been remarkably little attention given to the broad dimensions of marketing communications, the concepts, strategies, issues and challenges underpinning this important function in a dynamic service sector environment. This book aims to at least partially address this omission. It is important, therefore, that the book begins by attempting to define and limit its scope given the broad nature of the topic and the wide variety of concepts that fall within the remit of marketing communications.

Defining Tourism

Tourism has been defined as the sum of the relationships arising out of the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes (Wall and Mathieson, 2005). This physical movement from the familiar to the unfamiliar puts a great emphasis on the need for practical and relevant information on the characteristics of the destination and the means of travel by which consumers can access it. The tourism industry is broad, focusing on the idea of a tourism system (Leiper, 1990) comprising ‘generating regions’, ‘destinations’ and encompassing the discrete elements of the tourism service sector, also known as ‘principals’: transport services, accommodation providers and visitor attractions; as well as tour operators who package these elements together to provide an organised itinerary; and travel agents who are the intermediaries forming the link between tour operators and consumers (Cooper et al., 2005). A range of supplementary and ancillary services are also partially included within definitions of the tourism industry. This is important for gathering statistical data in order to record and attribute spending to this particular form of activity. These ancillary services include more as well as less obvious sectors of the economy, such as car-hire firms, taxis, insurance services, building and construction and public sector services. The nature of tourism partially as a ‘lifestyle’ activity lends itself to entrepreneurial activity and self-starter or sole trader businesses predominate and so the industry tends to be characterised in terms of structure by a very large number of small and micro-operations (whose primary concerns may not even be profit motivated; see for example Getz and Carlson, 2005) alongside a small number of extremely large and powerful multinational organisations. This means that there is a great deal of variation in the types, resources and practices of marketing activity in the tourism industry. This activity is often in the form of marketing communications, and because its structure, the industry creates a great volume of marketing activity by a wide range of organisations.

In addition, central to the tourism industry is the concept of a tourism ‘destination’. All places can potentially become tourism destinations, and many local, regional as well as national governments now realise the potential contribution that tourism can make as a tool for economic development or regeneration by providing resources to coordinate and facilitate the development of the tourism industry in their region. This is usually undertaken through a national tourism organisation (NTO) which is responsible for devolving resources to regional tourism organisations whose role is to coordinate activities through destination marketing partnerships (DMPs). These non-governmental organisations (NGOs) consist of partnerships between the public and the private sectors, and a large part of the activities of these organisations are directed towards marketing the destination, be that at national, regional or local level. It is recognised that tourism destinations are some of the most difficult entities to market because of the complex nature of the relationships between stakeholders (Buhalis, 2000).

A further crucial point to make about tourism when trying to identify its defining characteristics is that it is essentially a consumer activity. Tourism, and particularly leisure travel, vacations or holidays, can be considered as a discretionary consumer activity. This means that it is often portrayed as a non-essential item of household’s disposable income. Although many commentators have pointed out that holidays are often perceived by the highly developed service-driven economies of Western Europe as essential, there is little doubt that tourism is especially vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy where consumers’ disposable household income changes. A key issue in terms of marketing communications is that tourism is the ‘experiential’ consumer product par excellence, and this experience service creates the need to emphasise messages which appeal to consumers’ emotions in marketing. In addition, tourism is highly vulnerable to external forces or changes to the economies of destination countries, such as political crises or sudden and severe changes to exchange rates. News media coverage of places and events both exposes consumers to information about destinations, which can be negative or positive, and provides people with an image of the place and culture. Consumers of tourism can be highly fickle. Tourists are sometimes driven by a desire to ‘see the world’ and explore new places, so they are, perhaps, less likely to be loyal to a destination or country, although this conception of tourist motivation can be challenged. Trends in tourist consumer behaviour change very rapidly, and analysis of these trends can be useful in identifying wider social mores and patterns of behaviour or attitudes. One highly important aspect of tourists’ behaviour is that they like to talk about their experiences to other people – this is called ‘word of mouth’ communication, and it has always been cited as the most used, trusted, and reliable source of information influencing tourist choices and consumer behaviour.

Defining Hospitality

Lashley (2000) argues that hospitality in the historical sense concerns a duty of charitableness, offering protection (shelter) and succour (food and drink) to ‘strangers’ (2000: p. 6). This is in recognition of the fact that hospitality studies have in the past emphasised the commercial orientation, hospitality management, over the more intuitive and humanistic nature of hospitality in the social domain. Conventional definitions of hospitality focus on the provision of domestic labour and services for commercial gain. These services include food, drink and lodging which are offered for sale. Obviously, hospitality services are much more than simply about selling food and drink or providing people with a roof over their head for a night. It is clear that commercial hospitality organisations draw on images and a rhetoric of hospitality which connects more deeply with those historical and socio-anthropological meanings of hospitableness which holds importance for marketing communications.

There is an enormous variation in the range of prices for which these services can be charged and so the features of the products and services, and the quality of the service must be very carefully defined and communicated to the selected audiences. It is evident that hospitality services are intrinsic to the tourism industry, and although the hospitality industry serves a much wider range of clients’ needs than passing strangers and some would even argue that hospitality services form a vital and vibrant part of any community, there are sufficient synergies that link tourism and hospitality together in terms of the issues, challenges and contexts that conjoin them in relation to marketing communications.

The hospitality industry can be divided into components which deal in purely the provision of accommodation such as guest houses, hostels and backpackers, youth hostels and camping and caravan sites. Those that offer the full range of services, such as hotels, provide bar, restaurant, conference and meeting rooms, leisure, health, beauty and spa treatments as well as accommodation. A further distinction arises taking into account only those that offer food and beverage, such as restaurants, pubs, and bars and inns. A distinct but complementary sector arises out of the meetings, incentives, conference and events (MICE) markets which provide hospitality services and are often attached to hotels but are regarded as somewhat separate to conventional notions of hospitality. The sector can also be differentiated by an orientation to particular markets or consumers. Some sections of the trade focus solely on local markets, whereas others cater solely to tourists – in the case of the latter, this is mainly in the context of tourist resorts where there is little indigenous population and development is linked explicitly to the tourist trade. Thus again there is a huge variety in the size, scope, ownership structure and orientation to marketing in the hospitality industry making the challenge of understanding the usefulness and application of marketing communications complex and worthy of a specific focus of attention.

The hospitality industry is also characterised as a lifestyle consumer activity. Although its services are essential needs, the basics of life – food, drink and shelter – they are delivered as a consumer experience, and in recent years, there have been trends which reveal the ‘lifestylisation’ of hospitality, particularly used as a reward for hard work in advanced consumer economies. Therefore, in a similar way to tourism, hospitality has become an experiential consumer good, which explicitly aims to appeal to consumers’ emotions.

Marketing Communications in Tourism and Hospitality

Marketing communications has been considered as saying the right things to the right people in the right ways (Delozier, 1976). In defining marketing communications, it is useful to consider the two distinct elements: ‘marketing’ and ‘communications’. According to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), marketing is the managerial process by which goods, services and ideas are exchanged for profit. Communication can be conceived as a process of ‘meaningful information exchange’. Marketing communications, then, can be understood to be tied to a commercial intent, which means that whilst communications might include a broader range and remit of information provision, when considered in the context of marketing there is an assumption that the purpose of communications activity will result in benefits to the organisation and thus, either directly or indirectly, to profits. There must be a meaningful exchange of information, because the organisation needs to know that its messages are being received and interpreted in the ways in which they were intended. In this way, communication is not simply about sending messages out to audiences but requires a two-way process, a meaningful dialogue. Fill (2005) states that

Illustration

At the heart of every tourism and hospitality activity, experience is an act of communication. Think of the greeting received when entering into a restaurant or hotel, or at the check-in desk at the airport, the friendly chat with strangers met at the bar, or the first encounter with a person from another culture in the tourism destination. The interaction-rich context of these service encounters means that the role of communication in the production and consumption of tourism and hospitality services cannot be underestimated. It is this interpersonal communication which sets the tone for the entire experience of the service or the destination and underlines the importance of communications to the successful functioning of the wider contemporary business sector.

Marketing communications provides the means by which brands and organisations are presented to their audiences. The goal is to stimulate a dialogue that will, ideally, lead to a succession of purchases. Complete engagement. This interaction represents an exchange between each organisation and each customer, and, according to the quality and satisfaction of the exchange process, will or will not be repeated.

(Fill, 2005: p. 9)

Marketing communications in a contemporary sense, however, is more than simply ‘presenting the brand’ through advertising. It can relate to other forms of information and can be widened to bring in consideration of the broader strategic position of marketing in organisations. Marketing communications can be thought of as bringing a ‘strategic approach’ to all information originating from and coming into an organisation – potential and actual customers, supplie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Marketing Communications in Tourism and Hospitality
• Marketing Communications in Tourism and Hospitality
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Positioning Marketing Communications for Tourism and Hospitality
• Part 1 Part 1
• Chapter 2 Communications Theory and Applications
• Chapter 3 The Marketing Communications Environment
• Chapter 4 Consumer Roles in Marketing Communications
• Part 2 Part 2
• Chapter 5 Marketing Communications and Organisational Strategy
• Chapter 6 Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
• Chapter 7 Marketing Communications Planning
• Part 3 Part 3
• Chapter 8 Advertising Strategies for Tourism and Hospitality
• Chapter 9 Other Communications Strategies
• Chapter 10 Interactive and E-communications Issues and Strategies
• Chapter 11 Conclusions and Future Issues in Marketing Communications
• Index