Hotels and Resorts in ChiangMai - Products, Pricing, and Promotional Practices - Article Example

The results of the study showed a different picture of what is usually assumed concerning marketing. This is shown below:

Literature Review
From the literature review of the article, we get to know that three factors namely price, product, and promotions are used in ensuring that businesses operate efficiently and marketing campaigns are conducted effectively. The article analyzes price and in fact talks of the price being a major factor in terms of ensuring customer numbers are achieved. The article emphasizes the need for a good pricing model since the price is responsible for the generation of income (Etzel, 2004). Another important factor was a promotion in that it determines the way people are informed of a certain brand, service, or product. As a result, managers should make use of promotion methods that enhance brand perception such as messages which persuade, inform and linger in the minds and hearts of consumers (Daniels, 2009).

These factors influence the behavior of consumers in different sections of the world and about Chiang Mai, the four P’s (Price, Product, Promotion, and Place) are important in marketing tourism in the region. The place in this article looks into Chiang Mai as a tourist destination with a lot of attractions to offer in terms of nature, culture, and the hotel industry (Kandampully, 2007). Hotels in the region rely on the four P’s of marketing to enhance their product offering and thus some 19 hotels decided to conduct research based on these factors. In this case, questionnaires were deployed to conduct the study, and these questionnaires were given to managers and hotel guests.

Analysis
The marketing study was done based on certain variables and the study measured the implementation of marketing practices of hotels and resorts against customer satisfaction levels based on product offering, pricing, and promotions. In terms of ownership, the hotels in Chiang Mai are either corporate or individually owned and this affects the way businesses are marketed. For instance, solely owned hotels have unlimited liability unlike corporations while the age of the hotel is also a big factor since many of the hotels in Chiang Mai have been operating for a long time.

The products offered by these hotels were also surveyed and this included the rooms, types of services, and size of rooms and it was found that most of the hotels offer both sleep and food services (Swarbrooke, 2012). In the process of serving customers, the data analysis revealed that offering food in addition to lodging created better revenues. Apart from offering good products, the services that were offered by Chiang Mai’s hotels were superior in the fact that the managers considered services such as good hygiene, and prompt and courteous service highly considered in marketing.

However, it is the level of implementation of the marketing strategies and goals that were important in the process of undertaking this study. In terms of making use of price factors, most hotel managers made use of fair pricing systems to attract customers (Sangkaworn, 2008). However, promotion was considered among the high priorities of managers in terms of marketing since hotels made use of friendly gestures and hospitality to attract and retain customers. When the two sets of factors were correlated for the study, it was found that these two factors did not correlate. Since the scores failed to meet the 0.5 confidence level and therefore, the null hypothesis was rejected (Sangkaworn, 2008).

As a result, we see that the article concludes that the level of marketing is not directly related to these business factors such as ownership, no. of employees, or existence of the business. From the article, we can understand that customers are mainly satisfied with product offerings, promotions, and prices (Lockyer, 2007). These are mainly affected by the quality of service, and beverages, while others were happy because of the good prices based on the quality of the services. As a result, the hotel industry in Chiang Mai is mainly driven by the four P’s in marketing and this was not necessarily related to customer satisfaction. In the end we learned that making use of good pricing, promotion,s and better product offering will attract a huge customer base (Sangkaworn, 2008). However, to satisfy this customer base you have to improve service offerings that are targeted toward the needs of all these different consumers. Read More