Marketing Research's Crucial Role in Helping Marriott Hotels

968 Words2 Pages

Introduction
Apart from innovativeness and incisive management, Marketing Research has played a crucial role in helping Marriot segment the market and successfully launch and develop its line of hotels. Marketing research has been a significant backbone for the success of Marriott. Therefore, marketing research is an important requisite for Marriott to keep track of their changing consumer and business customer needs, to identify new opportunities in the hospitality service sector, to further develop and differentiate its various brands, and to develop strong brand equity. Through marketing research, Marriott has scaled magnificent heights of operational success.
Marriott’s framework for Marketing Research: An evaluation of the role of research towards Marriot’s tremendous success
Marriott has made enormous investments in diversifying its range in offering quality hospitality products and services. Through segmentation, the company focuses on individual groups such as travellers, families and other tourists (Malhotra, p.750). Marriott has a marketing research department within the organisation which effectively collects a large amount of secondary data on an on-going basis and in response to specific marketing problems and opportunities. These data provide valuable information such as: the number of non-business travellers staying at each of the Marriott’s hotels over time, the relative occupancy by non-business versus business travellers over time by specific Marriott brands, average length of stay by non-business travellers, etc. These data can provide a clear understanding of the non-business traveller segment and how this segment selects a hotel. Through this approach, different customers can access specialized services and ...

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...ugh, it is vital to categorize the data based on the different segments for strengthening the standards of uniformity and for further improvements in the near future.
References
1. Belk, R., Grayson, K., (2011). Research in Consumer Behaviour, Emerald Group Publishing.
2. Morrison, M., (2002). Using Qualitative Research in Advertising. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
3. Hospitality net, Marriott International Shares Rare Look into Innovative Next Generation Marketing Strategy - See more at: http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4062297.html (accessed on April 9, 2014)
4. Malhotra, N., (2010). Marketing Research, 6/E, Boston, MA: Prentice Hall.
5. A Marriott Success Story – See more at: http://industry.visitcalifornia.com/Market-Strategy/Liaison-Program/A-Marriott-Success-Story/ (accessed on April 9, 2014)

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