How Marriott International Target Their Market and Audience

A target market is a group of individuals or subsegments from a broader market which a company has identified as its primary customer base (Shoemaker & Shaw).  There are numerous ways to target certain customers within a market.  For example, a company may want to target certain customer base on geographic location and within the geographic location there are cities, parts of the cities, media market and even neighborhoods.  Demographic segmentations is also another common way of segmenting a market based on cultural, education, age, race, income and much more.  Each target market is designed with products and services in a way that the needs and wants of its primary customers are met successfully. 

The Marriott International has successfully built up different target market within its industry by specifically targeting the needs for their customers.  The JW Marriott, created by the Marriott international as a luxury brand, is designed to target mainly on customers who are seeking for a quiet and luxurious atmosphere during their accommodation.  These customers are mostly around the age of 30ths, who earns an average high income and usually travels for business purposes.  Therefore, their customers are mostly the individualistic, sophisticated, and self-defined travelers who are willing to spend more money on their accommodations while traveling on a business trip.  The purpose for the JW Marriott is to provide their guests with a simple elegant atmosphere that allow the customers to feel as leisured and comfortable as possible without any distraction or disruption.

The JW Marriott Kuwait which recently awarded Best Business Hotel indicates that they provided “simple elegance” and outstanding “intuitive service” ideally designed for business travelers who look for a quiet and undistracted accommodation.  According to the JW Marriott Kuwait City – Experience our hotel commercial, the hotel states that they provide large deluxe guest rooms and suites featuring luxury bedding, spacious work areas, high-speed internet, beautiful executive lounge, and outstanding spa and massage service.  Meanwhile, the hotel is located in the heart of the Kuwait city so it is also very convenient for them to travel around the city.  Opposite to the W hotels – known for their unique atmosphere, funky style and vibrant music, JW Marriott hotels strive for an inviting atmosphere and simple elegance.  According to the JW Marriott Kuwait City News, it clearly states that the brand is trying to provide their guests with a “quiet” and “luxurious” experience in the hotel because they believe being a luxury hotel does not need to consist with excess formality.  Instead, there will be no loud music, no exaggerated environment, and fancy decoration.  What is left will be a simple, elegance sense of sight so that their guests can enjoy staying in the beautiful hotel without distraction or disruption.  The hotel also promises to handle their guest’s request and needs in a very careful and precise manner, which means that guest can expect their needs and experiences to be highly satisfied. For example, a guest arrived at the Kuwait airport who is looking for a taxi to the JW Marriott Kuwait surprisingly found out that the hotel has actually already reserved a Mercedes to pick him up from the airport to the hotel (tripadvisor).  By doing this, the JW Marriott Kuwait will be able to attract and to maintain valuable customers who are more preferred to stay in a simple, quite, and luxurious place.  

Besides rooms and services, the JW Marriott also desired to target customers who are looking for high standard catering and cuisine in the hotel.  According to the official JW Marriott website, each hotel under this luxury brand offers authentic cuisine with fresh picked local ingredients and traditional local culinary skills.  Each fine dining restaurants in the hotel hired expert chefs and professional servers in order to provide the best dining experience for their customers.  The atmosphere, architecture, and the serving culture are also very genuine and varied as each city the JW Marriott hotel is locating.  And no doubt, the prices are expected to be high in value.  The PRIMO, one of the fine dining restaurants in the JW Marriott Orland, Grande Lakes, will be a demonstrating example showing the target market the hotel is trying to attract.  The PRIMO is a modern Italian restaurant under the JW Marriott hotel which they hired the James Beard Foundation’s Award-Winning Chef, Melissa Kelly, as the executive chef of the restaurant.  The restaurant is known for its “homegrown” concept where the chef guarantee to use only the finest ingredients for each dishes, which they stock up directly from PRIMO’s organic garden and local farms.  Consequently, people who choose to dine in this restaurant would expect to seek for a high standard of fine dining experience.  The hotel, on the other hand, would also expect to earn higher revenue from providing higher quality service and environment for their customers.

What is Customer Experience?

Today's economy has shifted from a service economy into an experience economy; products and service sare becoming more commoditized which is creating a need for hotels to differentiate themselves.  The co-production between the hotel and the guest in creating memorable guest experiences is an advantage for the hotels because they are designing and staging consumer experiences to create positive memorable experiences.  Experience is unique to the hospitality industry because it combines product and service through emotional, physical and cognitive connections with consumers. Experience is the total package which consumers purchase and if the hotel and guest are able to create positive memorable experiences then overall hotel integrity and value are improved.   

Today, providing good service to the customer has become the key to success while running a hospitality company.  However, a successful service company also realizes that by only providing good service is not simply enough.  Creating a memorable guest experience is more profitable for running the company in the long run.  According to Beyond Philosophy, a customer experience is created through the communication between the customer and the organization.  In such case, a customer will automatically perceive this interaction through their senses and mental power no matter if it is their conscious or subconscious mind.  A customer will determine and develop a feeling toward the organization by telling whether the service and the environment provided by the organization have met their expectations or not.  Another definition according to the textbook also states that customer experiences are created by the customer’s natural feelings.  The experiences to the customers are supposed to be memorable even after it has passed for long period of time.  It creates “economic value”, which means it helps the organization to create potential profits by bringing the customers back to the business.

As mentioned above, creating memorable experiences for guests can efficiently help the organization to generate profit because this is “what they come away with and remember the most.” (Textbook)  A customer will always come back for the same service after receiving a memorable experience from the company because it met the consumer’s expectations.  This is also what we call “customer loyalty”.  In the Harvard Business Review blog, Colin Shaw states that creating customer’s loyalty by providing them customer experiences will help to increase customer value and reduce costs.  Keeping long term customers does not only help the hotel to generate profits, but it also helps to stabilize the sales revenue because long term customers are less likely to stay in other hotels and they are usually less sensitive to the price changes. (Shaw)

Consumers, however, are not robots.  They have their own feelings and emotions each time they receive service from the company.  Consumers who have bad experiences with the company are less likely to return.  They may even post comments through social media websites about what they experienced, which can potentially dissuade potential customers for the company due to the importance and popularity of social media sites today.  Therefore, companies cannot expect that their customers will always have the same perceptions or experiences.  Customer expectations can change as well. Companies have to stay relevant with the changes and trends and always provide different memorable experiences in order to acquire and keep their customers.  Crafting a great customer experience requires enormous amounts of collaboration across departments in the company.  That is, it involves in many communications, editions, and good organization from management, which may be difficult, yet attainable. 

Memorable experiences can also result when service gaps arise, where service delivery falls to meet guest expectations.  For instance, the W San Francisco failed to limit the service gap between their reservation web page and to their prospective guests.  As reviewed on Tripadvisor, user Mattsaab was disappointed upon check in when “there [was] no lobby and the makeshift check in area [was] truly deplorable. There [were] work lights, tarps, paint and pathetic “oops” signs everywhere – letting you know that acknowledged that problem.”  Even though this was not a positive memorable experience, the guest wanted to inform others of this misfortune.  He even mentioned how the hotel should have informed their guests upon making the reservation.  This example of a memorable experience is not what companies strive to achieve but nonetheless they still leave a long lasting impression that might reflect their willingness to come back to the establishment.  In conclusion to his review, the user stated, “I would never stay here again and I felt truly ripped off.  Something I usually have not felt at any other W hotel before.”  With these examples the memorable consumer experience had by the couple above would probably be repeat and possible loyal customers for the future, while user Mattsaab will most likely never return due to his poor experience.  

Social Media and the Hospitality and Tourism Industry

The rapid advancement in technology and the internet’s prevalence in today’s world, consumers are becoming more and more knowledgeable about hospitality and tourism products and services because the amount of information and its accessibility.  Social media websites have become a popular tool among consumers in sharing personal experiences, comments, and opinions via the Internet.  The content of these social media websites are consumer-generated with the intent of educating others about products, brands, services and issues (Blackshaw).  According to Litvin, Goldsmith and Pan social media has transformed the way information is released and received via the internet; it has modified the concept of word-of-mouth creating what is known as electronic word-of-mouth.  Word-of-mouth is a concept of spreading information which greatly influences other consumers.  This is important because of the nature of hospitality products and services: severability, intangibility, perishability, high risks and competitive industry.  The industry is influenced based on the experiences of the consumers.  If consumers are finding more, new and improved ways of sharing experiences and information through social media then hospitality management must be aware and understand social media.

Social media affects both consumers and hospitality management.  For example, consumers now have fast access to update information, whether it is information about a hotel or restaurant or comments and reviews about the best tasting burger in town, consumer will be able to find the latest thoughts about anything.  Consumers looking for direction regarding experiences, i.e. restaurant experiences, hotel experiences, can search the Internet and generally be confident and trust other consumer’s opinions.  On the same hand, the concept above gives opportunities for hospitality management to improve service recovery by addressing negative comments or reviews on social media sites such as Tripadvisor, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube.... Hospitality management has the ability to quickly respond to consumers, and service recovery with social media can lessen the influence or impact of negative comments and reviews.  Hospitality management can also use social media as a means to analyze current performance and consumer satisfaction, and make improvements or corrections accordingly within the company.  Hospitality management has the opportunity to use social media as a marketing tool, a communication to consumers of what the company has to offer, creating a more attractive image to consumers.

Hotels always speak to their guests about their stay experiences, but sometimes its too impolite for the guests to express what they were truly thinking.  If hotels engage more with their revivers, the number of negative comments may decreases.  Scott Baublitz, the Director of Sales at San Francisco Union Square, read the most recent reviews posted especially with the low ratings and decided what they needed to do to satisfy guests and raise their hotel profiles on Tripadvisor rankings.  As you can read on Tripadvisor, he wrote back apologizing to some of the recent negative reviews and addressed how they will follow up on the issue and finally thanked the guest for staying at Hilton.  

According to Role of Social Media in Online Trael Information Search the complexity of the Internet and social media has created some issues with the hospitality industry.  Since the content of social media is largely consumer-based, it can make it difficult to filter through all the information that is available for consumers.  Searching for information through the Internet has been greatly influenced by large search engines that limit search results to only include the most “popular” social media sites.  The top players in the social media scene are very well represented in large search engines like Google, while the much smaller social media sites are under-represented.  Consumers are not always presented a good representation of the opinions, thoughts and expressions of consumers because only the popular social media sites are represented well in the internet.  As mentioned above, hospitality management has looked at social media as an opportunity to improve their business strategy.  However, ethical concerns arise when employees are asked to pose as consumers on social media sites to post and share positive experiences and comments to improve or create a better company image.  On the same note, the same concept is applied toward handling competitors; employees are asked to post and share negative experiences and comments to damage their competitors’ image or reputation.  Companies use these tactics because the Internet and social media sites are not clearly regulated and restricted, thus companies find ways to abuse them without anyone truly knowing and without any real consequences.

Becoming an Event Planner

If you want to become an event planner, think about what kills you have and match with those that are required to have as an event planner.  First off, as an event planner, you must be creative, well organized, have excellent interpersonal skills that can develop relationships as well as the ability to negotiate with vendors.  

When people think of events, meal or food, entertainment or music, invitations or registrations, etc. will always show up.  As the event planner, these are all the components that you need to pull together.  This sounds a lot of work and having personal experience in planning is a must.  The best way to start is to learn the basics by obtaining a certificate in event planning or a college degree.  Next step is to take what you learned in class and apply it by helping your family and friends planning events.  Another excellent way to hone your skills is to join your community and help them out with fundraisers and galas.  This is a great way to network in the community to help you prepare for a real job in the field. 

Creating and having a portfolio is critical to all event planners.  According to How to Break Into a Fab Job as an Event Planner, "a portfolio is a collection of samples of your work plus any other documents that can show people why they should hire you."  "The portfolio might include pictures, recommendation letters and anything else that shows prospective clients and/or employers what you have done or can do."  The purpose of portfolios is to help you stand out from other applicants who are in the same field, and it also proves that you have what it needs to perform the job well. Here is an example of a portfolio.

Lastly, the most important relationship you will build as an event planner is with the vendors as these are the suppliers that you supply you with the products and services for your events.  For example, equipments rentals, venues, florists, decors, and photographers.  If you have good relationships with them, you will get discounts and will be great partners.   

Finally, you can continue to learn and grow even after you became an event planner.  Always make notes of what worked and what not that way you can learn from mistakes and experiences, so in the next event, you will not make the same mistakes again and would make it even better.  Make each events as the opportunities to learn and succeed.  Always stay on top of trends and what is "hot".  Don't be afraid to try different things out and who knows people might be copying you.