Martketing Chapter 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

Company Records

Marketing managers should take advantage of the information that is currently being generated by various departments

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

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

Assessing information needs

Very serious step in creating an effective marketing information system A good MIS balances information that managers would like to have against that which they really need and is feasible to obtain Must decide whether the information is beneficial

Marketing Information System (MIS)

analyzes and assesses marketing information, gathered continuously from sources inside and outside an organization

Developing Marketing Information

gather relevant data Analyze information: -Difficult to make decisions based on raw data -because the data contains invisible patterns -Plotting data -Advanced statistical analysis