Destination Management

Destination Management

Student Name:

University:

Management:

Instructor:

July 23rd, 2013.

Destination Management

The fundamental destination marketing principles need to be at heart of every marketing organization or city. They are also critical components of brand management strategy as well as ingredients for decisive action. These principles entail:

Being customer-centric: This can be achieved through ensuring that the destination experiences are offered in a manner that delight customers and marketing messages strongly resonate with customers.

Constant Innovation: Destination marketing requires that organizations or cities act fast and introduce new creative methods, partnerships, products and messages of conveying relevant content to this changing industry.

Offering outstanding value: Business should focus of things which are really valuable to customers and visitors.

Targeting and understanding the destination market: Understanding the needs of particular segments and wider market trends is critical. This entails the development of meticulous products and services targeting the inherent features of a destination (Faulkner, 2007).

According to Faulkner (2007), the various levels of objectives and goals of destination marketing planning systems comprise:

A vision is the framework for the strategic planning of an organization. Its statement can apply the whole organization and just one unit of the organization, while a mission is a short description of the fundamental purpose of the organization. Mission answers the questions why the organization exists (Gayle & Goodrich, 2008).

The PRICE model components interpret the long-term and short-term volatility economics as a pricing factor. It relates these two components to quantify the tightness of business cycle and financial constraints.

The stages of destination marketing system entail

Source: (Gayle & Goodrich, 2008).

The Contents of a destination marketing plan are:

Overview of the business

Market Overview

Industry Information

Market Information

Customer Information

Service or Product Information

Objectives

Business Strategy

8PS

Operational plan

Action Plan

Budget

According to Faulkner (2007) the 8 Ps of destination marketing comprises:

Promotion: This involves promoting services and products to create public awareness and enable to visitors and customers to consume the services and products.

People: Customers usually share their destination experiences with family and friends, regardless of whether bad or good. Therefore, customer service is critical component of destination marketing.

Product: Within tourism industry, the product is the same as a service since some attributes of the product provide experience as opposed to tangible commodities. Therefore, products such as cultural, accommodation, food or transportation experiences should offer great experiences and customer satisfaction.

Partnership: Partnering with organizations which share same business aspirations, enhance across selling of services and in the end benefit both the partner companies, through enabling them to meet the marketing costs of the business.

Planning: Having a marketing plan enables an organization to establish customer expectations and develop a process of attaining those expectations.

Place: To market a tourism service or product, a company needs to ensure that the place is easily accessible to allow customers purchase or consume the service.

Packing: This is how the tourism product is presented to the customer.

Price: This is monetary value which a customer pays for a product or service. The price should factor in market share, competition, survival, profit maximization and positioning.

KRAs help assess the DMOs marketing performance through focusing on the results as opposed to activities, develop value-added decisions, set objectives and goals, and prioritize individual activities. KPIs help organizations measure and define progress toward attainting its fundamental success factors or objectives. KPIs are quantifiable parameters which are expressible in non-financial and financial aspects and reflect the organization’s nature. They help determine decline in expenses, increase unit sales, product quality among others (Gayle & Goodrich, 2008).

References

Faulkner, B., (2007), A model for the evaluation of national tourism destination marketing programs, Journal of Travel Research, Vol.35(3), pp.23-32

Gayle, D., and Goodrich, J., (2008), Tourism marketing and management in the Caribbean,

Routledge