Services Marketing



Services Marketing

Introduction

The hospitality and tourism industry is one of the biggest industries in the United Kingdom and in the entire world. Two of the major components of this industry are the marketing and public relations as in the highly competitive and sophisticated business world of the twenty first century; they play the key role in attracting and retaining customers i.e. the sales of products and services. Especially for businesses that focus on the luxury consumers, branding is an integral part of their core value proposition and there is no better way to create a brand identity and promote it than the use of interactive marketing strategies and public relations tactics.

Discussion

The hospitality and tourism industry is one of the biggest industries in the United Kingdom and in the entire world. Two of the major components of this industry are the marketing and public relations as in the highly competitive and sophisticated business world of the twenty first century; they play the key role in attracting and retaining customers i.e. the sales of products and services. Especially for businesses that focus on the luxury consumers, branding is an integral part of their core value proposition and there is no better way to create a brand identity and promote it than the use of interactive marketing strategies and public relations tactics. The use of the term 'interactive' is of immense significance in this context as it refers to the paradigm shift in the global marketing strategies from the rather traditional transactional marketing to a modern, more interpersonal form known as relationship marketing.

A shift from Transactional Strategies to Relationship strategies in Services Marketing

The concept of marketing mix, back in the 1960s, the 4Ps of marketing were introduced. Within a very short time of its advent, the marketing mix concept made its place in all the business textbooks around the world and also, was established as the uncontested fundamental model of marketing. Keeping up with the trend, the marketing mix concept also became the one and only model in the domain of marketing research. Even today, this particular concept has remained as the only contast to academics in the field of marketing around the world. Kent (1986) referred to the marketing mix (the Four Ps) as “the holy quadruple…of the marketing faith…written in tablets of stone” (p. 146). But with the advancement of business and the rise of industrial and services marketing, the marketing mix and the Four Ps have been proven more and more rigid and restricted in functionality. The transactional approach to marketing, the Marketing Mix seemed somewhat obsolete being the core of the marketing strategies applied by the service industry. The Marketing Mix concept incorporates a scientific approach in which the seller is the only active entity in a scenario making the consumers totally passive. It does not allow any room for any sort of personalized relationship between the consumers and the marketers and producers. The closest form of relationship it allows is, in some cases, through the involvement of professional ...