Blue Dolphin Holiday Park – Guest Experience

This blog post will be different than previous ones I have written; as it will focus how I can provide the best possible experience to guests. I have worked for Haven Holidays for four years at Blue Dolphin Holiday Park is located near the seaside town of Scarborough which offers picturesque clifftop walks and panoramic sea views. My current role is working as a receptionist.

Haven Holidays owns and operates 36 award winning family holiday parks throughout England. Haven is one of Britain’s largest provider of domestic holidays, (Bourne Leisure, 2015) which provides comfortable accommodation and offers a wide range of activities which include, kids’ clubs, leisure activities and entertainment, Haven’s aim is to provide families with a fun-filled escape.

A guests experience starts as soon as they book a holiday with Haven. My role as a receptionist is to ensure guests receive information by email or post with details of their holiday. A few days before a guest is due to arrive to the park, I will contact the guest via telephone to check their booking details, this is to make sure guest arrivals run smoothly and guests have peace of mind knowing the correct arrangements have been put into place.

Once a guest arrives at the park, I greet each guest with a friendly welcome. When I start to check guests into their accommodation, it is my responsibility to go through a guest welcome pack which provides information which a guest may need while staying at the park.

If a guest has a problem, it is my responsibility to go through these step by step, giving the guest my full attention and find appropriate solutions. Then I explain to the guest what I will do next and ask them if they are happy with what I’ve explained; unfortunately some problems cannot be solved straight away, therefore it is my responsibility to go that extra mile to resolve the issue. Once a problem(s) has been resolved  it is my responsibility  to inform the guest  and check they do not require further assistance, this is to ensure guests receive the best possible experience.

A company's market offering can include both tangible goods and services. At one extreme, the market consists of a pure tangible good, such as soap, toothpaste, or salt; no services accompany the product. At the other extreme are pure services, for which the market consists primarily of a service. Between these two extremes, however, many goods-and-services combinations are possible. Today, as products and services become more commoditized, many companies are moving to a new level in creating value for their customers. To differentiate their offers, beyond simply making products and delivering services, they are creating and managing customer experiences with their brands or companies (Armstrong & Kotler, 2013a).

Since 2015, there has been many improvements at the reception to help make a guests experience unforgettable. This year Haven Holidays have introduced a new mobile app ‘What’s on?’ which guests can download for free, the app provides guest with information about what’s going on in the park. With technology developing constantly this new mobile app with help to make a guests experience easier and simpler.

New to 2016, guest are now able to have pets in Prestige and Deluxe caravans before guests who brought their pet(s) with them were only allowed to stay in standard caravans. Guest felt that because they brought their pet(s) they were being downgraded and given less luxury accommodation. In order to improve a guest’s experience, guests are able to have pets in Prestige and Deluxe caravans, making guests feel they are being treated equally and given a better experience.

Reception is the first place where a guest comes to check in to their accommodation. Therefore first impressions are extremely important, if a guest has a bad/poor first impression, it can make a guest feel apprehensive about the rest of their holiday. As a receptionist it is important to provide guests with a positive first experience. A good first impression can make a guest feel excited and relieved that they can get settled into their accommodation without having to worry about anything.

Experiences have always been an important part of marketing for some companies. Companies that market experiences realize that customers are really buying more than just products and services. They are buying what those offers will do for them (Armstrong & Kotler, 2013a).

References:

Armstrong, G., & Kotler, P. (2013a). Marketing: An introduction, global edition. United Kingdom: Pearson Education.

Bourne Leisure Ltd. (2015). About Us. Retrieved from http://www.haven.com/support/about-us.aspx. 

Classical conditioning

Classical conditioning is associated with learning which two stimuli are repeatedly paired, and behavioural responses are first elicited by the second stimulus (shock) are eventually associated with and are produced when the first stimulus (tone) is presented alone.

Physiologist, Ivan Pavlov (1849 – 1936) conducted a series of experiments on the digestive progress in dogs, he inadvertently observed one of the most important associative learning processes, known as classical (Pavlovian) conditioning. He noticed that when the dogs were presented with food they would salivate, a natural, reflexive, behavioural response to food. Over time, the dogs began to salivate before they had received the food; they would salivate at the lab assistants, who fed the dogs.

Pavlov noted that the dogs had learned that the lab assistants were a cue for food being presented and alone could induce the behavioural responses similar to those induced by food itself. Pavlov investigated further, in a series of follow-up studies in which he rang a tuning fork prior to presenting the dogs with meat powder. To start with, only the meat powder elicited salvation, the tuning fork did not, but after repeated pairings of the tuning fork followed by the meat powder, the dogs began to salivate at the sound of the tuning fork.

Pavlov studies identified four key concepts of classical conditioning. The unconditioned stimulus (US) is a cue that naturally and reflexively elicits a target behaviour, also known as the unconditioned response (UR). In his study, the US was the meat powder and the UR was salivation. The conditioned stimulus (CR) is initially a neutral cue, but after being paired with the US comes to elicit the target response. The timing between the CS and US is critical. The CS must come before the US, and the closer in time the two occur the faster and stronger learning will be (Milosevic & McCabe, 2015).

An example of classical conditioning in marketing is Coca – Cola Christmas advert. When people are asked the question ‘What comes to your mind when you think about Christmas?’ There is a likelihood of someone mentioning Coca – Cola. This is because of classical conditioning, which has allowed Coca – Cola to intentionally create a connection between the festive season and the brand.

Christmas (unconditioned stimulus) is likely to create positive emotions of excitement, joy and family (unconditioned response) however, before conditioning takes place, Coca – Cola (neutral stimulus) does not create any emotions since no brand associations yet exists. However, combining Christmas and Coca – Cola in famous TV adverts, the positive emotions and family re-merge, to the extent that when Coca – Cola is subsequently displayed alone (creating stimulus), these emotions persist (conditioned response), thus creating a brand association between Coca – Cola and Christmas.

Reference:

Milosevic, I. & McCabe, R. (2015). Phobias: The psychology of irrational fear. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.

Consumer markets and consumer buyer behaviour

Consumer markets and consumer buyer behaviour

Consumer buyer behaviour refers to the buying behaviour of consumers - that buy goods and services for personal consumption. All of these consumers combine to make the consumer market. The American consumer market consists of more than 314 million people who consume more than $15 trillion worth of goods and services each year, making it one of the most attract consumer markets in the world (Armstrong & Kotler, 2013).

Consumers are all different and vary in age, income, education level, and tastes. How these diverse consumers relate with each other and with other elements of the world around them impacts their choices among various products service and companies.

Consumers are face with making buying decision every day, and the buying decision is the focus point of the marketer’s effort. In order for marketers to understand what a consumer needs and wants, marketers should study real consumer purchases to find out what they buy, where and how much. However, learning consumer buying behaviour is not easy and often consumers themselves don’t know exactly what influences their purchases (Armstrong & Kotler, 2013).

Marketers can measure the what, when and where of consumer buying behaviour. But it is difficult to ‘see’ inside the consumers head. Marketers spend a lot of time and money trying to understand what makes consumers tick.

Consumer purchases can be influenced by cultural, social, personal and psychological characteristics, marketers cannot control such factors, but they must been taken into account.

Culture. Culture is the basic cause of a person’s wants and behaviour. A child in the United States normally learns or is exposed to the following values: achievement and success, individualism, freedom, hard work, activity and involvement, efficiency and practicality, material comfort, youthfulness and fitness and health (Armstrong & Kotler, 2013). Every group of society has a culture, and cultural influences on buying behaviour may vary from both county to county and country to country. Marketers are always trying to spot cultural shifts so as to discover new products that might be wanted.

Subculture. Each culture contains smaller subcultures, or groups of people with shared values based on common life experiences and situations. Subcultures include nationalities, religions, racial groups and geographic regions. Armstrong & Kotler (2013) identified that subcultures make up important market segments and marketers often design products and marketing programmes tailored to their needs.

Social Factors. According to Armstrong & Kotler (2013), a consumer’s behaviour can be influenced by social factors. Social factors such as groups and social networks, word – of – mouth influence, opinion leader, family, role and status.

Personal Factors. A buyer’s decisions can be influenced by personal characteristics such as the buyer’s age and life – cycle stage, occupation, economic situation lifestyle and personality and self – concept.

Psychological Factors. A person’s buying choices are further influenced by four major psychological factors: motivation, perception, learning beliefs and attitudes.

My next post I hope to write about Psychological factors.

Thank you for reading

References:

Armstrong, G. & Kotler, P. (2013). Marketing: An introduction, global edition (12th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education.

Gamification in tourism

Game – based marketing offers a potentially new type of marketing opportunity in tourism. Gaming or electronic games provide players with an immersive and interactive entertainment experience often through dynamic and real – time interaction with their context, local organisations and fellow players (Feifei Xu, Feng Tian, Dimitrios Buhalis, Jessika Weber & Hongmei Zhang 2015). The development of technology such as smartphones and tablets, gaming becomes mobile and allows dynamic interaction in the palm of the users’ hand.

According to researchers mobile games have changed the game players’ experience in a number of ways (Blum, Wetzel, Mccall, Oppermann, & Broll, 2012). One of the changes is that gaming experiences have been extended into the real world, and are available at any place and at any time (Benford, Magerkurth, & Ljungstand, 2005).

Recently, the application of game elements have been used in a non – gaming context called gamification, such as business, health and education (Xu, Webber, & Buhalis, 2014). Technology is designed to change attitudes and behaviours of users through persuasion and social influence (Bogost, 2007), without using deception.

As a new approach to promote tourism destinations, gaming provides tourism organisations and destination marketers with the opportunity to create informative and entertaining setting for successful brand awareness, interaction and communication. Middleton (1994) said that tourist decision – making is affected by both formal (advertising, internet and sales promotion) and informal channels of communication, which forms stimulus inputs.

Gaming has the potential to help develop experiences and support dynamic interactions, for example: location – based games can be a way of experiencing points of interests for tourists through a treasure hunt.

Some games often collect information about brand consumers, determine behaviour patterns, thought processes, priorities, and interests. Engaging users/tourists at a deeper level to help them conceptualise and improve their experience. An example is the Dublin Augmented Reality Project, which is funded by Dublin City Council to develop a mobile augmented reality (AR) application for the tourism industry in Dublin.

Gaming in tourism is a new and emerging area. However, it is very challenging as designers need to have an understanding of both the tourists’ needs and the gamers’ desires, and then blend them together to deliver memorable, fun and engaging gaming experience.

The use of games in the tourism industry may potentially provide great marketing opportunities. Tourism is an experience industry (Pine & Gilmore, 2011) that is increasingly based on personalisable services. According to the World Travel Market Report (2011), gamification is a major trend for the coming years in tourism, which will appeal to consumers across all age demographics.

There current use of gaming by the tourism industry can be divided into two types:

1.    Social games – based on social media such as Facebook, which are mainly used for brand awareness, to attract potential customers, and to build up a destination or a company image.

2.   Location based – are mainly used to encourage more engagement on – site, to enhance tourists’ on – site experiences at the destination in a more fun and informative way (Waltz & Ballagas, 2007).

Conclusion

For gamification to become effective and useful for the travel and tourism industry, a sufficient understanding of players’ motives and gaming experience will need to be considered in order to design the games. Gamification can help to make marketing personalised for tourism and will also provide the opportunity to build online communities. Destinations around the world are investing more in how to use ICT in destination management and marketing. Gaming can enhance tourists’ interest in the destination, provide experience and knowledge which is otherwise not available.

References:

Benford, S., Magerkurth, C., Ljungstrand, P. (2005). Bridging the physical and digital in pervasive gaming. Communications of the ACM, 48 (3), 54 – 57. doi: 10.1145/1047671

Blum, L., Wetzel, R., Mccall, R., Oppermann, L., & Broll, W. (2012). The final timewarp: Using form and content to support player experience and presence when designing location – aware mobile augmented reality games. In Proceedings of the designing interactive systems conference (pp. 711 – 720).

Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Feifei Xu, Feng Tian, Dimitrios Buhalis, Jessika Weber & Hongmei Zhang (2015): Tourists as Mobile Gamers: Gamification for Tourism Marketing. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing. doi: 10.1080/10548408.2015.1093999

Middleton, V. T. C. (1994). Marketing in travel and tourism. Oxford: Butterworth – Heinemann

Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (2011). The experience economy, updated version. Watertown, MA: Harvard Business School.

Waltz, S. P., & Ballagas, R. (2007, September 24 – 28). Pervasive persuasive: A rhetorical design approach to a location – based spell – casing game for tourists In Proceedings of situated play. DiGRA 2007 – The 3^rd international digital games research conference (pp. 489 – 597). Tokyo.

Xu, F., Webber, J., & Buhalis, D. (2014, January 21 – 4). The gamification of tourism. In Z. Xiang & I. Tussyadiah (Eds.), Information and communication technologies in tourism 2014 (pp. 525 – 537). Wein: Springer. Proceedings of the international Conference in Dublin. Yee, N. (2006). Motivations for play in online games. Cyber Psychology & Behavior, 9 (6), 772 – 775. doi: 10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772

Marketing Planning

A marketing plan beings with the identification (through market research) of specific customer needs and how the firms intends to fulfil them while generating an acceptable level of return. Marketing is the process of developing and implementing a plan to identify, anticipate and satisfy customer demand, in such a way as to make a profit.

A sensible way to manage the sales and marketing of a company is to find a systematic way of identifying a range of options, to choose one or more of them, then to schedule and cost out what has to be done to achieve the objective (McDonald, 1999).

Marketing planning is a logical sequence and a series of activities leading to the setting of marketing objectives and the formulation of plans for achieving them. Companies go through a kind of management process in developing marketing plans. This process is usually informal to small undiversified companies. However, in larger diversified organisation, the process is often systematised.

This process is simple and involves a situation review, the formulation of some basic assumptions, setting objectives for what is being sold to whom, deciding on how the objectives are to be achieved.

The marketing plan focuses on issues relating to the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion.

Managers have to consider the following questions when making a marketing plan:

Product – Who will buy it and why? How is it better than its competitors?

Price – What pricing strategy will the company choose? Is the plan to sell large volumes so that economies of scale can keep the price low?

Place – How will the product be distributed? Will it be sold by retail stores or by direct marketing?

Businesses should also consider using the SWOT analysis - looking at the products Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Promotion – What is the advertising strategy? How will the product be packaged? What will its marketplace positioning be? (Alvarez, Raeside, & Jones, 2006).

A marketing strategy forms part of a marketing plan. It explains how a product will be distinguished from its competitors. A sales plan should then give details of promotional events and campaigns that will deliver the strategy.

References

McDonald, M. (1999). Marking plans: How to prepare them, how to use them (4th ed.). Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers.

Alvarez, J., Raeside, R., & Jones, W., (2006). The importance of analysis and planning in customer relationship marketing. Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management, 13 (3), 222 - 230. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.libaccess.hud.ac.uk/docview/233329202/fulltextPDF?accountid=11526.

Share a Coke

Share a Coke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X8Bd3-G6IU

In 2013 and 2014, Coca - Cola swapped their famous logo with people's names, so that people could Share a Coke with others. Each of the bottles and cans carried #ShareaCoke hashtag to encourage people to promote the brand online.

The most popular UK names were selected and printed on labels and made even more available online. This marketing campaign was one of the company's most successful campaigns.

Marketing Director Lucie Austin and Creative Excellence Lead Jeremy Rudge came up with the idea for Share a Coke from offices in Sydney in 2011. After being presented with a standout visual - a wall of Coca - Cola cans stacked on shop shelves, each with different names on. The company found a truly shareable idea that made headlines and captured the Australian public's attention (Grimes, 2013). 

The campaign had:

• Over a thousand names on Coca - Cola bottles and cans
• 998 million impressions on Twitter
• 235,000 tweets from 111,000 fans using the #ShareaCoke
• More than 150 million personalised bottles sold
• Over 730,000 glass bottles personalised via e - commerce store
• 17,000 virtual name bottles shared online across Europe
• 65 experiential stops on the Share a Coke tour
• Young adult consumption increased significantly, up by 7%

Source: (Coca - Cola, 2015).

Since the UK campaign was launched in April, it became a big hit. From a social perspective, Coca - Cola saw it's Facebook community grow by 3.5% and globally by 6.8%. A study from YouGov in May 2013, using it's BrandIndex, Coca - Cola had also increased it's Buzz score, moving it from negative to positive (Grimes, 2013).

In April 2013, Coca - Cola released the first 150 names on bottles. Then sent a select few as gift to celebrities and then let the public discover them in - store for themselves, so they could be the first to break the news on social media (Coca - Cola, 2015).

Everyone loves something that's personal an unique to him or her, even if it is just a drink. It became apparent that personalised content is a core focus - 78% of consumers feel that brands that create unique and personalised content are more interest in building a relationship with them (Coca - Cola, 2015).

Coca - Cola's marketing campaign was an effective one as it allowed people to use social media to promote their product. When the company put names on bottles it give people a personal connection and interaction with the brand. 

References:

Coca - Cola. (2015). The Share a Coke story. Retrieved from http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/stories/history/advertising/share-a-coke/. 

Grimes, T. (2013, July 24). What the Share a Coke Campaign can teach other brands. the guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2013/jul/24/share-coke-teach-brands 

Sainsbury’s Christmas Advert 2015 – Mog’s Christmas Calamity

Sainsbury’s campaign is partnered with the charity – Save the Children. Save the Children is hoping to improve child literacy across the UK under its Read On, Get On initiative.

In 2014, Sainsbury’s First World War – themed Christmas campaign featured enemy soldiers exchanging food and gifts in the trenches. In 2015, Sainsbury’s continue the “Christmas is for sharing” motto with its advert Mog’s Christmas Calamity which promotes children’s literacy.

The advert tells the tale of how Mog manages to destroy a kitchen on Christmas Eve in a series of unfortunate incidents – but ends up being praised as a hero for accidentally alerting the fire brigade. The heart – warming tale which sees the neighbours come together to share what they have so Mog’s family can have a perfect Christmas.

Sainsbury’s advert is funny and heart – warming at the same time, the advert shows viewers the meaning of sharing. Many viewers who have seen the advert may be able to relate to this advert, as things do not always go the way we want them to at Christmas.