The marketing concept maintains that the starting point for good marketing, whether it be for a service or a product, is to understand the situation from the perspective of the customer. To appreciate the customer’s view of your business and your market offering, you need to appreciate several factors. First, many of your customers or potential customers view anything offered by a business with...

Customer service is one of the most crucial aspects of an organization’s competitive advantage and it is the critical element which internal marketing (IM) influences, whatever business or industry the organization operates. Internal marketing is based on the notion of communicating with internal markets and treating employees like customers. Implementing an internal marketing plan helps in edu...

Since the 1970s, services marketing has grown into a major sub discipline of marketing. It is constantly claimed – but is refuted in the article – that services are now the dominant economic activity in developed countries and keeps growing while the two traditional goods sectors, manufacturing and agriculture, are declining. In today's competitive world, having expertise, knowledge and marketi...

How can a service firm right-size marketing expenses and yet strive to maximize revenue? This paper represents the first attempt to model these efficiency and effectiveness issues using a 49-unit Asia–Pacific hotel chain as illustration. We employ a triangular DEA model with total expenses (controlling for number of rooms) as the raw input, marketing expenses as intermediate output/input and re...

Increasingly customers publish their opinions or observations regarding tourism products on the internet. Review websites allow customers to express their opinion regarding the service offered during their stay by awarding points to pre-selected criteria or by publishing their comments. This feedback can provide valuable information to service providers. Whether these alternative sources of mar...

M ARKETING thinking and practice has been gradually moving into service industries. Its role in service industries is still limited, however. It has achieved some utilization in banks and airlines, to a lesser degree in insurance, brokerage, and public transportation, and still less in law, accounting, management consulting, medicine, architecture, and engineering. Even marketing research firms...

Mobile marketing refers to the twoor multi-way communication and promotion of an offer between a firm and its customers using a mobile medium, device, or technology. We present the conceptual underpinnings of mobile marketing and a synthesis of the relevant literature. We identify and discuss four key issues: drivers of mobile device/service adoption, the influence of mobile marketing on custom...