3440 week 6

•Market segmentation

-Dividing a market into direct groups of buyers who might require separate products or marketing mixes

•Market targeting

-Evaluating each market segment's attractiveness and selecting one or more segments to enter

•Membership groups

-Groups that have a direct influence on a person's behavior and to which a person belongs.

•Market homogeneity

-If buyers have the same tastes, buy a product in the same amounts, and react the same way to marketing efforts, undifferentiated marketing is appropriate.

•Descriptive research

-Marketing research to better describe marketing problems, situations, or markets, such as the market potential for a product or the demographics and attitudes of consumers

•Causal research

-Marketing research to test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships.

•Experimental research

-The gathering of primary data by selecting matched groups of subjects, giving them different treatments, controlling related factors, and checking for differences in group responses.

•Brand image

-The set of beliefs consumers hold about a particular brand

•Ethnographic research

-Trained observers interact with and/or observe consumers in their natural habitat.

•Degree of product homogeneity

-Undifferentiated marketing is more suited for homogeneous products. Products that can vary in design, such as restaurants and hotels, are more suited to differentiation or concentration.

•Belief

-A descriptive thought that a person holds about something

•Aspirational group

-A group to which a person wishes to belong.

•Motive

-A need that is sufficiently pressing to direct a person to seek satisfaction of that need

•Attitude

-A person's enduring favorable or unfavorable cognitive evaluations, emotional feelings, and action tendencies toward some object or idea.q

•Lifestyle

-A person's pattern of living as expressed in his or her activities, interests, and opinions

•Cognitive dissonance

-Buyer discomfort caused by postpurchase conflict

•Buzz marketing

-Cultivating opinion leaders and getting them to spread information about a product to others in their community

Consumer purchases are strongly influenced by:

Cultural characteristics, social characteristics, personal characteristics, and psychological characteristics

•Marketing dashboards

are like the instrument panel in a car or plane, visually displaying real-time indicators to ensure proper functioning.

•Data warehouses

collect data from a variety of sources and store it in a one accessible location.

Managers often start with exploratory research and later follow with

descriptive and/or causal research

As companies increase the number of claims for their brands, they risk

disbelief and a loss of clear positioning

A product's position is

is the way the product is defined by consumers on important attributes—the place the product occupies in consumers' minds relative to competing products

Marketing intelligence includes

everyday information about developments in the marketing environment that helps managers prepare and adjust marketing plans and short-run tactics

Information needed by marketing managers can be obtained from

internal data, marketing intelligence, and marketing research

Perceptual mapping, a research tool, is sometimes used to

measure a brand's position •Perceptual maps can also be developed using consumers' perceptions of a number of product attributes •Increased competition or an ineffective positioning strategy can make repositioning necessary •Perceptual maps provide data supporting the need for repositioning •an example of hotels plotted on the attributes of price and perceived service •On this map we see there is a correlation between service and price; as price goes up, so does service

When evaluating different market segments, a firm must look at three factors:

segment size and growth, segment structured attractiveness, and company objectives and resources •Segment Size and Growth •A company must first collect and analyze data on current segment sales growth rates and expected profitability for various segments • •Segment Structural Attractiveness •A segment might have desirable size and growth and still not offer attractive profits •The company must examine several major structural factors that affect long-run segment attractiveness •For example, a segment is less attractive if it already contains many strong and aggressive competitors • •Company Objectives and Resources •All companies must consider their own objectives and resources in relation to available segments •Some attractive segments can be dismissed quickly because they do not mesh with the company's long-run objectives

two main research instruments

the questionnaire and mechanical devices

Once a company has chosen its target market segments, it must decide

what positions to occupy in those segments

Markets consist of buyers who differ in one or more ways. They may differ in

• their wants, resources, locations, buying attitudes, and buying practices •Because buyers have unique needs and wants, each is potentially a separate market

•External Sources of Marketing Intelligence

•A hospitality company must encourage suppliers, convention and tourist bureaus, and travel agencies to pass along important intelligence •Members of management should be encouraged to join community and professional organizations where they are likely to obtain essential marketing information

•Mail questionnaires

•Advantages •They can be used to collect large amounts of information at a low cost per respondent •May give more honest answers to personal questions •No interviewer is involved to bias respondents' answers •Convenient for respondents •Good way to reach people who often travel •Disadvantages •Not very flexible •Require simple and clearly worded questions •All respondents answer the same questions in a fixed order •Cannot adapt the questionnaire based on earlier answers •Take longer to complete than telephone or personal surveys •Response rate is often very low •The researcher has little control over who answers the questionnaire

Demographic Segmentation

•Age and Life-Cycle Stage •Consumer preferences change with age •However, marketers must be careful to guard against stereotypes when using age and life-cycle segmentation • •Gender •Gender marketing is by no means simplistic •Gender marketing is most effective when combined with lifestyle and demographic information • •Income segmentation Income does not always predict which customers will buy a given product or service

A buyer's decisions are also influenced by personal characteristics such as age and life-cycle stage, occupation, economic situation, lifestyle, personality, and self-concept

•Age and Life-Cycle Stage •The types of goods and services people buy change during their lifetimes •Preferences for leisure activities, travel destinations, food, and entertainment are often age related •Successful marketing to various age segments may require specialized and targeted strategies •This will almost certainly require segmented target publications and database marketing •Buying behavior is also shaped by the family life-cycle stages • •Occupation •A person's occupation affects the goods and services bought • •Economic Situation •A person's economic situation greatly affects product choice and the decision to purchase a particular product • •Lifestyle •People coming from the same subculture, social class, and occupation may have quite different lifestyles •A lifestyle is a person's pattern of living as expressed in his or her activities, interests, and opinions • •Personality and Self-Concept •Each person's personality influences his or her buying behavior •By personality we mean distinguishing psychological characteristics that lead to relatively consistent and enduring responses to the environment •Many marketers use a concept related to personality: a person's self-concept (also called self-image) •Each of us has a complex mental self-picture, and our behavior tends to be consistent with that self-image

Marketing Information System

•Assessing Information Needs •A good marketing information system balances information that managers would like to have against that which they really need and is feasible to obtain •The company must estimate the value of having an item of information against the costs of obtaining it • •Developing Marketing Information •Information needed by marketing managers can be obtained from internal data, marketing intelligence, and marketing research (See Slide 4) • •Marketing Intelligence Marketing intelligence includes everyday information about developments in the marketing environment that helps managers prepare and adjust marketing plans and short-run tactics

• •Sources of Competitive Intelligence

•Competitive intelligence is available from competitors' annual reports, trade magazine articles, speeches, press releases, brochures, and advertisements •Hotel and restaurant managers should also visit their competitors' premises periodically

The marketing research process consists of four steps

•Defining the Problem and Research Objectives •Managers must work closely with marketing researchers to define the problem and the research objectives •The manager best understands the problem or decision for which information is needed, and the researcher best understands marketing research and how to obtain information (See Slide 8) • •Developing the Research Plan •The second marketing research step calls for determining the needed information and developing a data collection plan (See Slides 9-13) • •Implementing the Research Plan •The researcher puts the marketing research plan into action by collecting, processing, and analyzing the information •The data-collection phase of the marketing research process is generally the most expensive and the most subject to error •The collected data must be processed and analyzed to pull out important information and findings • •Interpreting and Reporting the Findings •The researcher must now interpret the findings, draw conclusions, and report the conclusions to management •Interpretation is an important phase of the marketing process •Managers and researchers must work closely together when interpreting research results Both share responsibility for the research process and resulting decisions

Developing the Research Plan

•Determining Specific Information Needs •Research objectives must be translated into specific information needs • •Gathering Secondary Information •To meet a manager's information needs, researchers can gather secondary data, primary data, or both •Secondary data consist of information already in existence somewhere, having been collected for another purpose •Primary data consist of information collected for the specific purpose at hand • •Designing the sample (See Slide 12) • •Presenting the Research Plan •The final stage of developing the research plan is to putting the plan is writing so the plan can be reviewed by those involved in the implementation of the plan and those involved in using the results of the research can review the plan •The plan should cover the management problems addressed, the research objectives, information to be obtained, sources of secondary information and/or methods for collecting primary data, and how the results will aid in management decision making •The plan should also include research costs and expected benefits

•Subculture

•Each culture contains groups of people with shared value systems based on common life experiences and situations •Subcultures include nationalities, religions, racial groups, and geographic regions

Marketing Research Objectives

•Exploratory research •To gather preliminary information that will help define the problem and suggest hypotheses • •Descriptive research •To describe the size and composition of the market • •Causal research •To test hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationship

•Designing the sample calls for four decisions.

•First, who will be surveyed? •The researcher must determine what type of information is needed and who is most likely to have it. • •Second, how many people should be surveyed? •Large samples give more reliable results than small samples •However, it is not necessary to sample the entire target market or even a large portion to obtain reliable results •If well chosen, samples of less than 1 percent of a population can give good reliability. • •Third, how should the sample be chosen? •Sample members might be chosen at random from the entire population (a probability sample) •The researcher might select people who are easiest to obtain information from (a convenience sample) •The researcher might also choose a specified number of participants from each of several demographic groups (a quota sample) • •A fourth decision—when will the survey be given? •Failure to match the time the data is collected with business patterns can result in invalid survey results

Market Segmentation

•Geographic Segmentation •Geographic segmentation calls for dividing the market into different geographic units, such as nations, states, regions, counties, cities, or neighborhoods • •Demographic Segmentation •Demographic segmentation consists of dividing the marketing into groups based on demographic variables such as age, life cycle, gender, income, occupation, education, religion, race, and nationality •Demographic variables are the most popular bases for segmenting customer groups (See Slide 5) • •Psychographic Segmentation •Psychographic segmentation divides buyers into different segments based on social class, lifestyle, or personality characteristics •People in the same demographic group can have very different psychographic characteristics •Marketers also use personality variables to segment markets • •Behavioral Segmentation •In behavioral segmentation, buyers are divided into groups based on their knowledge, attitude, and use or response to a product (See Slide 6)

•Telephone interviewing

•One growing use of telephone surveys is when the customer volunteers to take the survey and calls into a toll-free number •Some of these surveys are automated, which reduces the cost of the survey •Unfortunately, the general public has become increasingly reluctant to participate in telephone surveys •Advantages •Provides a method for gathering information quickly •Greater flexibility than mail questionnaires •Explain questions that are not understood •Skip some questions and probe more on others, depending on respondents' answers •Greater sample control •Disadvantages •Cost per respondent is higher than with mail questionnaires •Some people may not want to discuss personal questions with an interviewer •Using an interviewer increases flexibility but also introduces interviewer bias

Consumer behavior is also influenced by social factors

•Groups •Groups that have a direct influence and to which a person belongs are called membership groups •Reference groups serve as direct (face-to-face) or indirect points of comparison or reference in forming a person's attitudes or behavior •People often are influenced by reference groups to which they do not belong. For example, an aspirational group is one to which the individual wishes to belong • •Word-of-Mouth Influence and Buzz Marketing •Word-of-mouth influence can have a powerful impact on consumer buying behavior •The personal words and recommendations of trusted friends, associates, and other consumers tend to be more credible than those coming from commercial sources, such as advertisements or salespeople •Buzz marketing involves enlisting or even creating opinion leaders to serve as "brand ambassadors" who spread the word about a company's products • •Online Social Networks •Online social networks are online communities where people socialize or exchange information and opinions •Marketers must be careful when tapping into online social networks • •Family •Family members have a strong influence on buyer behavior • •Roles and Status •A person belongs to many groups: family, clubs, and organizations •An individual's position in each group can be defined in terms of role and status •A role consists of the activities that a person is expected to perform according to the persons around him or her •Each role carries a status reflecting the general esteem given to it by society •People often choose products that show their status in society

•Marketing research is a process that:

•Identifies and defines marketing opportunities and problems •Monitors and evaluates marketing actions and performance •Communicates the findings and implications to management

The positioning task consists of three steps: (positioning strategy)

•Identifying a set of possible competitive advantages on which to build a position •Selecting the right competitive advantages •Effectively communicating and delivering the chosen position to a carefully selected target market

•Most companies have moved away from mass marketing and toward target marketing

•Identifying market segments •Selecting one or more of them •Developing products and market programs tailored to each • •The first is market segmentation •Dividing a market into distinct groups who might require separate products and/or marketing mixes (See Slide 4) • •The second step is market targeting •Evaluating each segment's attractiveness and selecting one or more of the market segments (See Slide 5) • •The third step is market positioning Developing competitive positioning for the product and an appropriate marketing mix (See Slide 6)

•Not all brand differences are meaningful or worthwhile •Not every difference makes a good differentiator •Each difference has the potential to create company costs as well as customer benefits •Therefore, a hospitality company or a visitor destination must carefully select the ways in which it will distinguish itself from competitors •A difference is worth establishing to the extent that it satisfies the following criteria:

•Important •The difference delivers a highly valued benefit to target buyers. In the case of a visitor destination, personal safety has become a top benefit • •Distinctive •Competitors do not offer the difference, or the company can offer it in a more distinctive way • •Superior •The difference is superior to other ways that customers might obtain the same benefit • •Communicable •The difference is communicable and visible to buyers • •Preemptive •Competitors cannot easily copy the difference • •Affordable •Buyers can afford to pay for the difference • •Profitable •The company can introduce the difference profitability

Personal interviewing

•Individual (intercept) •Involves talking with people in their homes, offices, on the street, or in shopping malls •Intercept interviews are widely used in tourism research •Group interviewing •A common type of group interviewing is a focus group •Focus group interviewing is usually conducted by inviting six to ten people to gather for a few hours with a trained moderator to talk about a product, service, or organization •Focus group interviewing is rapidly becoming one of the major marketing research tools for gaining insight into consumers' thoughts and feelings •Advantages •They allow the researcher to probe and gain insight into consumer behavior •Qualitative research is useful to gain insight into definitions and concepts •Disadvantages •The main drawbacks to personal interviews are cost and sampling

Sources of Marketing Information

•Internal Data •Many companies build extensive internal databases, electronic collections of consumer and market information obtained from data sources within the company network •Marketing managers can readily access and work with information in the database to identify marketing opportunities and problems, plan programs, and evaluate performance •Information in the database can come from many sources •Internal databases usually can be accessed more quickly and cheaply than other information sources, but they also present some problems • •Guest History Information •The single most important element in any hospitality marketing information system is to have a process for capturing and using information concerning guests •Guest information is vital to improving service, creating effective advertising and sales promotion programs, developing new products, improving existing products, and developing marketing and sales plans and to the development and use of an effective revenue management program • •Guest Information Trends •Information concerning guest trends is vital to planning and revenue/yield management •Gathering this vital information requires careful planning by a management information system •It is seldom, if ever, sufficient to try to retrieve and use data from a company's files if prior consideration was not given to the form in which it would be needed • •Guest Comment Cards •Provide useful information and can provide insights into problem areas •A problem with guest comment cards is that they may not reflect the opinions of the majority of guests • •Listening to and Speaking with Guests •Many organizations have developed formal ways of interacting with guests •If employees are trained to listen to guest comments and feed them back to management, this can be a powerful source of information • •Automated Systems •The decreasing cost and increasing capacity of automated guest history systems will allow hotels to create close relationships with their customers once again • •Mystery Shoppers •Hospitality companies often hire disguised or mystery shoppers to pose as customers and report back on their experience •A mystery shopper works best if there is a possibility for recognition and reward for good job performance • •Company Records •Marketing managers should take advantage of the information that is currently being generated by various departments • •Point-of-Sale Information •The point-of-sale (POS) register will undoubtedly offer opportunities to compile and distribute, through a computer, information that is currently entered into reports manually

•Selective Attention `

•People are exposed to a tremendous amount of daily stimuli: The average person may be exposed to over 1,500 ads a day •Because a person cannot possibly attend to all of these, most stimuli is screened out—a process called selective attention •Selective attention means that marketers have to work hard to attract consumers' notice •People are more likely to notice stimuli that relate to a current need •People are more likely to notice stimuli that they anticipate •People are more likely to notice stimuli whose deviations are large in relation to the normal size of the stimuli

• •Selective Retention

•People forget much of what they learn but tend to retain information that supports their attitudes and beliefs •Because of selective retention, we are likely to remember good points mentioned about competing products

Research Problem Areas

•Making assumptions •For example, a restaurant was considering adding a piano bar. Researchers developed a customer survey. One question asked customers if they would like entertainment in the lounge, without mentioning the type of entertainment • •Lack of qualitative information •For example, a study done by Procter & Gamble found that the most important attribute in the decision of frequent travelers to return to a hotel was a clean appearance. To use this information, management needs to know how their guests judge clean appearance • •Failing to look at segments within a sample •Survey results should be analyzed to determine difference between customer groups •For example, a club surveyed its membership on how satisfied they were with the lunches purchased in the dining room. The average of all responses was 2, with 1 being very satisfied, 3 being satisfied, and 5 being not satisfied. However, when the total sample was divided into membership classes, it was found that one category of members had a high level of satisfaction 1.5, whereas another class gave an average rating of 2.7 • •Improper use of sophisticated statistical analysis •The researcher claimed that adding a professor would increase enrollment. What happens at most universities is professors are added to meet an increase in student enrollment. The number of faculty and students are positively correlated; however, students create faculty positions, not the other way around • •Failure to have the sample representative of the population •Ideally, the sample should be representative so that the researcher can make accurate estimates of the thoughts and behaviors of the larger population

•Using Multiple Segmentation Bases

•Marketers rarely limit their segmentation analysis to only one or a few variables only •Rather, they often use multiple segmentation bases in an effort to identify smaller, better-defined target groups

•Internal Sources of Marketing Intelligence

•Marketing intelligence can be gathered by a company's executives, front-desk staff, service staff, purchasing agents, and sales force

Requirements for Effective Segmentation

•Measurability •The degree to which the segment's size and purchasing power can be measured • •Accessibility •The degree to which segments can be assessed and served • •Substantiality •The degree to which segments are large or profitable enough to serve as markets • •Actionability •The degree to which effective programs can be designed for attracting and serving segments

•The ten most common activities are:

•Measurement of market potentials •Market-share analysis •Determination of market characteristics •Sales analysis •Studies of business trends •Short-range forecasting •Competitive product studies •Long-range forecasting •Marketing information systems studies •Testing of existing products

A person's buying choices are also influenced by four major psychological factors: motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes

•Motivation •A person has many needs at any given time •A need becomes a motive when it is aroused to a sufficient level of intensity • •Perception •A motivated person is ready to act. How that person acts is influenced by his or her perception of the situation •Perception is the process by which an individual selects, organizes, and interprets information to create a meaningful picture of the world • •Learning •When people act, they learn •Learning describes changes in an individual's behavior arising from experience •Learning theorists say that learning occurs through the interplay of drives, stimuli, cues, responses, and reinforcement •When consumers experience a product, they learn about it • •Beliefs and Attitudes •Through acting and learning, people acquire beliefs and attitudes, which, in turn, influence their buying behavior •A belief is a descriptive thought that a person holds about something •An attitude describes a person's relatively consistent evaluations, feelings, and tendencies toward an object or an idea •Attitudes put people into a frame of mind for liking or disliking things and moving toward or away from them •Attitudes are very difficult to change

Three basic research approaches are:

•Observational research •The gathering of primary data by observing relevant people, actions, and situations •Observational research can yield information that people are normally unwilling or unable to provide •A wide range of companies now use ethnographic research, which involves sending trained observers to watch and interact with consumers in their "natural habitat." •Ethnographic research often yields the kinds of details that just don't emerge from traditional research questionnaires or focus groups •Observational and ethnographic research often yields the kinds of details that just don't emerge from traditional research questionnaires or focus groups • •Survey research •The approach best suited to gathering descriptive information •Structured surveys use formal lists of questions asked of all respondents in the same way •Unstructured surveys let the interviewer probe respondents and guide the interview according to their answers •The major advantage of survey research is its flexibility •Depending on the survey design, it may also provide information more quickly and at lower cost than can be obtained by observational or experimental research • •Experimental Research •The most scientifically valid research is experimental research, designed to capture cause-and-effect relationships by eliminating competing explanations of the observed findings •Experimental research is best suited for gathering causal information

Behavioral Segmentation

•Occasion Segmentation •Buyers can be grouped according to occasions when they make a purchase or use a product • •Benefits Sought •Buyers can also be grouped according to the product benefits they seek •Knowing the benefits sought by customers is useful in two ways •First, managers can develop products with features that provide the benefits their customers are seeking •Second, managers communicate more effectively with their customers if they know what benefits they seek • •User Status •Many markets can be segmented into nonusers, former users, potential users, first-time users, and regular users of a product • •Usage Rate •Markets can also be segmented into light, medium, and heavy product users • •Loyalty Status •A market can also be segmented on the basis of consumer loyalty •A major reason for increasing customer loyalty is that "loyal customers are price insensitive compared to brand-shifting patrons"

Differentiation can occur by physical attributes, service, personnel, location, or image

•Physical Attribute Differentiation •Restaurants such as Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Lidia's in Kansas City, and the chain Chipotle Mexican Grill use natural/organic foods to differentiate themselves • •Service Differentiation •For example, Sheraton, Shangri-La, and other hotels provide an in-room check-in service. Red Lobster takes "call aheads" • •Personnel Differentiation •Companies can gain a strong competitive advantage through hiring and retaining better people than their competitors • •Location Differentiation •Location can provide a strong competitive advantage • •Image Differentiation •Even when competing offers look the same, buyers may perceive a difference based on company or brand image •Thus, hospitality companies need to work to establish images that differentiate them from competitors

•Mechanical Instruments

•Researchers also use mechanical instruments to monitor consumer behavior •These methods as simple as recording how much customers consume to measuring how brain activities change when exposed to different marketing stimuli

• •Selective Distortion

•Selective distortion is the tendency to twist information into personal meanings and interpret information in a way that will fit our preconceptions

•Social Class

•Social classes are relatively permanent and ordered divisions in a society whose members share similar values, interests, and behaviors

•Cultural factors exert the broadest and deepest influence on consumer behavior

•The most basic determinant of a person's wants and behavior It comprises the basic values, perceptions, wants, and behaviors that a person learns continuously in a society

•Questionnaires

•The questionnaire is by far the most common instrument, whether administered in person, by phone, by e-mail, or online •Questionnaires are very flexible— there are many ways to ask questions •Closed-end questions include all the possible answers, and subjects make choices among them •Examples include multiple-choice questions and scale questions •Closed-end questions provide answers that are easier to interpret and tabulate •Open-end questions allow respondents to answer in their own words •Open-end questions are especially useful in exploratory research, when the researcher is trying to find out what people think but is not measuring how many people think in a certain way.

•Online Interview

•There are so many ways to use the Internet to do research •A company can embed a questionnaire on its Web site in different ways and offer an incentive to answer it, or it can place a banner on a frequently visited site such as Yahoo!, inviting people to answer some questions and possibly win a prize •Online research is estimated to make up over 35 percent of all survey-based research, and Internet-based questionnaires also accounted for a third of U.S. spending on market research surveys •Advantages •Internet surveys are quick and can be inexpensive •Online focus groups offer many advantages over traditional focus groups •Participants can log in from anywhere; all they need is a laptop and a Web connection •Disadvantages •The response rate can be a problem if they are not properly designed and targeted •Online focus groups can lack the real-world dynamics of more personal approaches

•the model of buyer behavior

•This figure shows that marketing and other stimuli enter the consumer's "black box" and produce certain responses •Marketers must determine what is in the buyer's black box •The black box has two parts •First, a buyer's characteristics influence how he or she perceives and reacts to the stimuli •Second, the buyer's decision process itself affects outcomes •The marketing stimuli consist of the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion • •Other stimuli include major forces and events in the buyer's environment: economic, technological, political, and cultural • All these stimuli enter the buyer's black box, where they are turned into the set of observable buyer responses shown on the right: product choice, brand choice, dealer choice, purchase timing, and purchase amount

Positioning Errors

•Underpositioning •Failing ever to position the company at all • •Overpositioning •Giving buyers too narrow a picture of the company • •Confused positioning •Leaving buyers with a confused image of a company

Selecting Market Segments

•Undifferentiated Marketing •Using an undifferentiated marketing strategy, a company ignores market segmentation differences and goes after the entire market with one market offer •It focuses on what is common in the needs of consumers rather than on differences •Undifferentiated marketing provides cost economies •Most contemporary marketers have strong doubts about the strategy in today's competitive environment •It is difficult to develop a product and brand that will satisfy all or even most consumers • •Differentiated Marketing •Using a differentiated marketing strategy, a company targets several market segments and designs separate offers for each •Differentiated marketing typically produces more total sales than undifferentiated marketing • •Concentrated Marketing •Concentrated marketing, is especially appealing to companies with limited resources •Instead of going for a small share of a large market, the firm pursues a large share of one or a few small markets. • •Micromarketing •Differentiated and concentrated marketers tailor their offers and marketing programs to meet the needs of various market segments and niches. At the same time, however, they do not customize their offers to each individual customer. •Micromarketing is the practice of tailoring products and marketing programs to suit the tastes of specific individuals and locations. Rather than seeing a customer in every individual, micromarketers see the individual in every customer. •One form of micro marketing is Local Marketing, which tailoring brands and promotions to the needs and wants of local customer groups-cities, neighborhoods, and specific restaurant/hotel/store locations.

A sample

•is a segment of the population selected to represent the population as a whole

The buyer decision process consists of five stages:

•need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and postpurchase behavior •This model emphasizes that the buying process starts long before and continues long after the actual purchase •It encourages the marketer to focus on the entire buying process rather than just the purchase decision •In more routine purchases, consumers skip or reverse some of these stages •Need Recognition •The buying process starts when the buyer recognizes a problem or need •Marketers must determine the factors and situations that trigger consumer problem recognition • •Information Search •How much searching a consumer does will depend on the strength of the drive, the amount of initial information, the ease of obtaining more information, the value placed on additional information, and the satisfaction one gets from searching • •Evaluation of Alternatives •Each consumer sees a product as a bundle of product attributes •The consumer attaches different degrees of importance to each attribute •The consumer is likely to develop a set of beliefs about where each brand stands on each attribute •The set of beliefs held about a particular brand is known as the brand image •The consumer is assumed to have a utility function for each attribute •A utility function shows how the consumer expects total product satisfaction to vary with different levels of different attributes • •Purchase Decision •In the evaluation stage, the consumer ranks brands in the choice set and forms purchase intentions •Purchase intention is also influenced by unexpected situations • •Postpurchase Behavior •If the product matches expectations, the consumer will be satisfied •If it falls short, the consumer will experience dissatisfaction •Almost all major purchases result in cognitive dissonance, or discomfort caused by postpurchase conflict

A marketing information system (MIS) consists

•of people, equipment, and procedures to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate, and distribute needed, timely, and accurate information to marketing decision makers

•The purpose behind tourism marketing is to...

•promote the business, organization, event or destination, •make it stand out from rivals, •attract customers, and •generate brand awareness.

People can emerge with different perceptions of the same object because of three perceptual processes:

•selective attention, selective distortion, and selective retention

Marketing researchers usually draw conclusions about large consumer groups by

•taking a sample