Description
MARKETING in its general concept is difficult to define. In applying its principles to the hospitality industry it becomes much more understandable. Because marketing has been a neglected commercial skill in the food and lodging world, we must ask you to be patient if we seem to oversimplify in our efforts to make our thesis clearly understood. We must also glance back at the precedents that have been used, rather spottily, in the transient housing business in place of marketing,Looking back, what we have really had is a hit-and-miss, divided, sort of partial marketing. To define marketing most briefly, it is all of the planning and action that goes into a) searching out all potential sources of business, b) finding just what it is that these potential customers want and need in the way of facilities and services, c) selling those potential customers, d) servicing them so that they spend the maximum amount of money, and e) convincing them to return again. In the hotel and motel field, here is what has been happening in the most general terms. The general manager hires an individual and labels him with the tag of sales manager, director of sales, or some such title. He charges this person with the job of going after group room business-conventions, tour groups, and the like. The general manager himself takes on the assignment of handling the advertising to develop individual room business. He gives a banquet manager or a catering manager the task of soliciting banquet business. Internal promotion and display advertising, in most cases, is also handled by the general manager.Some of the lesser sales tools are left out of this divided assignment of businesspromotion responsibilities altogether. At best, what has been done heretofore has been a rather indefinite, disconnected, unrelated, accidental sort of partial marketing. And this hodgepodge flies directly in the face of true marketing, which is a precise, carefully measured, detailed, coordinated planISBN:9780937056035
