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Industry

Hospitality Leadership Through Learning
Industry

Strategic Marketing

Course Focus

Marketing—more than any other business function—connects consumers to companies. Marketing identifies profitable target markets. Marketing crafts competitive positioning strategies and articulates the brand promise. Marketing listens to the voice of the customer to guide product innovation, pricing, and distribution. Marketing attracts consumer attention and shapes attitudes toward the brand. Marketing monitors guest satisfaction with the service experience and fosters guest loyalty. Thus, it is critical for managers to understand how marketing integrates the activities of hospitality organizations to create value for guests.

Key Benefits

Participants will adopt a strategic-marketing orientation to develop a keen sense for how marketing influences most every aspect of hospitality production, from design of the hospitality experience to operations and human resources activities. Participants will acquire a new lens for seeing how guests perceive the hotel product and for making more tactical operational and marketing decisions that best build the brand—and enhance guest loyalty.

Topics Include:

  • Ways to identify, understand, and segment target markets
  • Methods for mining marketing information from customers, competitors, and the marketing environment
  • Evaluation of best-practice brand building in the hospitality industry
  • Tools for assessing brand marketing/operations alignment, including “servicescape” and “service-as-theater” analysis
  • An approach for designing persuasive marketing communications
  • Ideas for strengthening customer relationships, loyalty, and profitability

Faculty