Marketing, Promotion and the Role of Technology
What this domain covers
This domain covers segmentation, the marketing mix, destination branding, promotion and the technology that now shapes distribution and pricing. It rewards the ability to distinguish marketing from advertising.
Core rules and concepts
- Marketing is not promotion: marketing begins with research into customer needs and then designs the mix.
- Segmentation: demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioural. Choose segments you can serve and reach; positioning is the distinct place you occupy in the customer's mind.
- 7Ps: product, price, place and promotion, plus people, process and physical evidence.
- DMOs market a whole destination and control little of the product; individual businesses market their own offer.
- Promotion mix: advertising, public relations, sales promotion, personal selling, direct and digital.
- Technology: GDS for trade bookings, OTAs and meta-search for consumers, dynamic pricing and revenue management, social media and user-generated content, CRM and personalisation, mobile check-in.
- Disintermediation is principals selling direct; reintermediation is new online intermediaries taking that role.
Worked example
A campaign delivers 200,000 impressions at 2% click-through, giving 4,000 clicks; 5% of clicks book, giving 200 bookings; at US$80 commission each that is US$16,000 against US$3,000 spend, a return of about 5.3 to 1. Reasoning: multiply through the funnel, then divide gross return by spend and state the measure used.
Traps that cost marks
- Describing only advertising when asked about marketing.
- Ignoring the product when the price is wrong.
- Quoting reach without conversion or cost.
- Confusing a DMO's role with that of a tour operator.