Update

Jim fang

IHMN416 Cohort: Marriot

Spencer Brown

Nov, 18 2018

Co-creation is the process where brands and customers work together to generate to make service-side provide the best quality of goods and services. Experiential marketing is a trend where a service can be marketed via experience that involves consumers produce emotional affection to it. Hotels make their profits through the provision of services to their customers. For a hotel to succeed in the future, it needs to offer quality services to its customers and ensure they have a smooth and healthy working relationship. Co-creation and experiential marketing have been in use by hotels to increase their profits margins and better services. In this paper, I will discuss how hotels will embrace and utilize co-creation and experiential marketing in the future.

Experiential marketing is one of the tools which will be embraced by hotels in various ways as a form of marketing it. During the experiential marketing, the industry will have interaction with the customer via seeing, hearing, using, and participating, and fully arouse customer sensory and rational factors such as sense, feel, think, act, and relate. One of the ways in which hotels will embrace and utilize experiential marketing in the future is by having partnerships with other industries. Hotels may plan to hold events with a complementary company that will aim of increasing their sales. Both hotel and complementary company here will bear lesser costs compared to if they could host event independently. For example, a company selling luxury spirit brand may join hands with a hotel where they will hold the event in the hotel as they promote their products (luxury spirits). As they firm to promote its luxury spirits, at the end of the day, the customers will have seen the services which the hotel offers and in the future the customers may decide to visit the hotel to get the services. This kind of partnership may attract young and high-wealth individuals hence will come for hotel services.

Recently, majority hotels and brands decide to incorporate reward program as a way of experiential marketing. Hotels decide to have various reward schemes where the customers are expected to participate and love them. It is this program that will make more customers result in making purchases to these hotels (Schmitt, 2000). When clients reach these rewards schemes, they will get to know more about the hotel where they may decide to visit later.

Some of the hotels may decide to be hosting very big events as a form of experiential marketing. The hotel may be hosting events like local reception, association meeting or a business meeting among others. During the vent hosting, the hotel may decide to build a very operative realistic marketing activation around that. For example, the 20th Annual Chiefs of Defense (CHOD) Conference 2017 in Victoria and the conference co-hosted by the Canadian Armed Forces and the United States Pacific Command (USPACOM) at the Fairmont Empress Hotel (Victoria department of national deference, 2017). During the time all participator and staff stay at Empress, they experience a high standard service and a unique luxury atmosphere that belong to Fairmont brand. Some of the people they never know about Fairmont, but after that, it’s through this experience that customers will have the experience of the hotel and decide to be visiting it again.

Embracing and utilizing experiential marketing by a hotel may be through creating campaigns which give customers reasons why they need to be in your hotel. Hotels will have to know the kind of visitors or guests it receives. The hotel should know what type of travelers are interested in visiting their hotels; be it families, affluent men, and women, vacationers or business travelers. The hotel may decide to make their guest get to know on how to make reservations, check out banqueting alternatives, and determine new design topographies about the hotel via their Smartphone (Smilansky, 2017). For example, a hotel which deals with individuals who travel for pleasure may decide to give an opportunity to take a virtual tour from the Washington, DC area to Hawaii and London.

Hotels may decide to embrace and utilize co-creation as a way of marketing its services. In order to come up with the best decision both for the hotel and its customers, the hotel may decide to be inviting visitors on a monthly basis or weekly present their views. The guests should be submitting their concepts and vote on other people’s ideas. Through voting for the ideas of their choice, the one which garn high number of votes will be considered hence such decision will be implemented by the hotel. For the effectiveness of this type of co-creation the hotel should always implement the ideas they get from customers otherwise the whole idea won’t have any beneficial effects on both parties.

Another way in which hotel will utilize co-creation is through carrying out surveys both online and offline (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). Hotels may decide to come up with a survey which will be uploaded in the social page of the hotels where their customers will be expected to fill them. The offline survey can also be carried out where some staff members of the hotels will be moving from one place to another requesting members’ of the public to fill the survey. Also, the hotel may decide to wait for the customers who visit their hotel and aid them in carrying out the survey. Out of the survey carried out, a management team will have to sit and come up with the best decisions which have been attained after integrating the survey hence help come up with the best decision. An example of brand immersion is when a hotel may decide to carry out a survey which will be enquiring to know how many people are likely to visit the hotel and give reasons why they visit or are not interested in visiting it (Chathoth, Altinay, Harrington, Okumus & Chan, (2013). Out of the questions given in the survey, the reason for visiting the hotel will be improved at the same time the reason for not visiting will be acted upon to make them positive for people to visit.

Moreover, hotels will own their own personalized apps which will be the main area for interaction between the hotel and the customers. The customers will be able to pour their ideas and expectation of the hotel through this app (Ck, 2015). In a likely manner, the hotel will get to know what customers expect of them to deliver and which manner. It’s through this app that the co-creation will be attained between the two participating parties.

In conclusion, for hotels to be successful in the current world, it needs to embrace and utilize co-creation and experiential marketing. Experiential marketing is a good tool for the creation of a positive relationship between hotel and customers. There are various advantages which are liked with hotels which makes use of experiential marketing compared to those who don’t. Co-creation has great deals for it helps both hotel and customers to make joint decisions concerning the services being offered in the hotel.

References

Chathoth, P., Altinay, L., Harrington, R. J., Okumus, F., & Chan, E. S. (2013). Co-production versus co-creation: A process based continuum in the hotel service context. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 32, 11-20.

Ck, N. (2015). Customer Relationship Manage-ment and Customer Retention in the Amica Restaurant at Valmet Oy Ltd.

National Defense. (2017). Conclusion of the 2017 Pacific Command Chiefs of Defense Conference  - Canada.ca. Retrieved from https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/news/2017/09/conclusion_of_the2017pacificcommandchiefsofdefenseconference.html

Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004). Co-creation experiences: The next practice in value creation. Journal of interactive marketing, 18(3), 5-14.

Smilansky, S. (2017). Experiential marketing: A practical guide to interactive brand experiences. Kogan Page Publishers.