Mgt726 Managerial Project 11 - Assessment Answer

1.3 Research question and objectives 

The aim of this research is to assess the impact of E-marketing on the tourism and hospitality business to increase the consumer loyalty and brand reputation of the Hilton Brisbane Hotel, Australia. With regards to the research aim, the following Research Questions have been developed:

What is the relationship between e-marketing and consumer behavior in hotel and hospitality industry?

What is the meaning and concept of e-marketing and consumers purchasing decision in case of Hilton Hotel?

What are the scopes of e-marketing and possible impacts on the consumers of Hilton Hotel and their purchasing decision?

Which is the most effective strategy of e-marketing for Hilton Hotel to influence the purchasing decision of their consumers?

As per the above research question the following Research Objectives have been developed:

RO1: To find the relationship between e-marketing and consumer behavior in hotel and hospitality industry

RO2: To explore the meaning and concept of e-marketing and consumers purchasing decision in case of Hilton Hotel

RO3: To examine the scopes of e-marketing and possible impacts on the consumers of Hilton Hotel and their purchasing decision

RO4: To find the most effective strategy of e-marketing for Hilton Hotel to influence the purchasing decision of their consumers

The major boundary of this research is its focus that mainly developed on the e-marketing part and its scope to influence the purchasing decision and the behaviour of consumer. There could be plenty of other factors that influences the consumer loyalty of the company. However, the research aimed to assess the relationship and concept between e-marketing and consumer decision to make some positive changes in their consumer volume.

This report have been developed to present the research progress while taking the research objectives, method, literature review, background study, expected outcomes and analysis under consideration. This report also describes the timeline of the research procedure as well as the deliverables.

Chapter 2: Literature Review/Theoretical Framework

In this part of the paper the collected data and information from various literature has been presented to explore the theoretical concept of E-marketing in Hospitality industry and the impact on consumer behaviour and decision making. The following literature review has been covered the concept of E-marketing, the theories of consumer decision and the intervention of E-marketing in hospitality industry.

2.2 Topic 1 Digital age and E-Marketing 

E-marketing in other words Digital marketing is the most popular and cheapest marketing tools globally. Every industry uses this marketing tools to research and market and to promote their product and service to the huge pool of potential consumers. E-marketing is also known as Internet Marketing or Online marketing because of its necessity of using internet system and networking tools like E-mail, Pay Per Click, SEO, social page advertisement and  others (Deloitte 2018). The major reasons behind this huge popularity of E-marketing are it offers huge audience for advertisement, opportunity to maintain public relation, keeping the business up to data with the events, conducting loyalty program, fetching market data and many more. There are many forms of marketing that can be executed through the digital or E-marketing using some essential tools, such as Online Article, Blogs, Social media, Video Marketing, Email marketing, Affiliate marketing and others (Jackson and Ahuja 2016).

Recently another marketing tools is taking a larger base utilisers named Demo app advertisement. In this promotional activity a company can come up in an agreement with an application or game developer to support their development. On this favour, the developer has to incorporate the link of the advertisement of partner company in the application, to promote their product as well (Trading economics 2018). The main advantage of the E-marketing is it allows the business organisation to deliver the information to appropriate target audience while taking their feedback for market research simultaneously.

There are many theories in business management and organisational control that allow to understand the psychological factors of consumers on their purchasing decision and behaviour. According to Bamossy and Solomon  (2016), Consumers decision making is aligned with their behaviour with three sequential factors including the Extensive Problem Solving quality of product, Limited Problem Solving quality of the product and the Routine Response behaviour of the consumer.

Many other external factors influence the consumer perspective including economic background, cultural view, emotional view and expectations. The figure 1 shows the simplistic model of consumer behaviour and decision-making (De Pelsmacker, van Tilburg and Holthof 2018). In hospitality industry, the widely used theory is Maslow Motivation Theory of Hierarchy. As per this theory 6 stages regulate the motivational factors of a parson before the purchasing decision namely, psychological needs, Safety needs, Social needs, Esteem needs and self-actualisation.

2.4 Topic 3 E-Marketing in Hospitality Industry

In Hotel chain marketing and hospitality industry the digital marketing tools has been becoming popular since the development of Web 2.0 that allows the user to customise their own User interface in a dynamic platform (Kannan 2017). In 2010, the Google map opened new feature that allow the user to view the hotels and their description in any area in globe. Apart from that, the social media based marketing is also becoming more popular with the utilisation of online consumer relationship and forum based feedback collection system (Tiago and Veríssimo 2014). Today more than 78% of members in hospitality industry prefers the digital communication media as their marketing tool over the other form of direct and indirect promotional strategies and marketing (Trading economics 2018). In Australia the Hotel companies are registered in Australian Tourism government website that allow the user to visit directly to the official page of the hotel through the hyperlinks. In most of the digital marketing strategies of the international hotel chain or hospitality company, the feedback collection is implemented as post purchasing evaluation and market analysis.

As per the literature review it has been found that there are many ways through which a hotel company can execute their marketing strategy by using the digital marketing. It is also clear that along with the advancement of networking technology the impact of E-marketing on potential and existing consumer is increasing. However, the major boundaries of this literature review are the lack of dynamic data collection and the lack of representation of real live example in terms of E-marketing success and profitability.

Chapter 3: Methodology

In this section, the paper has discussed about the research methodology that emphasise the strategic tools and application of the research process. It also described the research approach an philosophy that can justify the pattern of the research progression. The data collection and analysis format has been discussed along with the required time frame for these activities.

3.2 Research approach and justification 

The research approach refers the pattern of utilising the strategic tools in the research module. The approach of a research can be ether Deductive and Inductive (Bryman and Bell 2015). In order to analyse the impact of E-Marketing on the consumers of hotel and hospitality industry, the research followed the inductive research approach. This approach allowed the research to explore the field of the research rational exploration and reasoning without having a particular assumption of hypothesis prior of the conduction of research.  On the other hand, the deductive research approach allow a research to develop an assumption at the initial stage and design the research to testify if the assumption or hypothesis is wrong or right. According to the research aim there are not enough market idea to develop a particular hypothesis. On the other hand, assuming something about the consumer behaviour could restrict the distribution of the research field. Henceforth, the research also considers exploratory as its research design instead of explanatory of descriptive.

3.3 Details of specific data collection techniques 

Data collection is the most essential part of a research along with the analysis. In a research the researchers can have Secondary and primary data collection technique. In order to collect the theoretical framework about the consumer behaviour this study followed the secondary data collection (Eriksson and Kovalainen 2015). The secondary data collection allowed collecting second hand data from previous research article, study report, market report, theoretical books and other. Most of the secondary data collection has been presented in the literature review section. On the other hand, the primary data collection allowed this research to examine the real life environment using various strategic tools like survey. The primary data collection has helped the research to collect real time data by conducting survey on Consumers of Hotel industry. The survey has been designed with 10-structured questioner with 2 demographical questions. report will be developed by random sampling. The following table describes the data collection and analysis plan aligned with the determined objectives of the research.

3.4 timeline 

I the following timely the red marked zone is representing the timeline before submission of the research proposal. The blue marked area is representing the timeline before submitting the progress update. Finally, the yellow marked area is representing the final dissertation preparation and submission timeline.

Chapter 4: Proposed Analysis of Results 

The collected data will be analysed with both qualitative and quantitative analysis procedure. In qualitative analysis procedure the collected data in literature review has been analysed with thematic analysis (Reilly and Jones 2017). On the other had the quantitative analysis allowed this research to analyse the numerical results from survey report through mathematical and statistical analysis. Theoretical and thematic analysis has been used to complete this objective.  Literature review will be used to support the survey through questionnaire. Questionnaire has been developed to conduct survey on participants regarding impact of E-marketing on consumer purchasing decision in case of Hilton hotel.

The data analysis section will be presented in two separate sections namely the analysis of quantitative data and analysis of qualitative data. Then in the discussion part the analyses data will be discussed with by combining qualitative and quantitative findings. For quantitative data the major utilising numerical assessment technique will be the percentage analysis. The data presentation will be executed with the following presentation structure. In the following table the presented data are hypothetical.

As per the above hypothetical table the age of the majority of respondents is ranged 15 to 35. Therefore as per the hypothetical result the next presented results are more likely to be true for this age group.

References

Bamossy, G.J. and Solomon, M.R., 2016. Consumer behaviour: A European perspective. Pearson Education.

Bryman, A. and Bell, E., 2015. Business research methods. Oxford University Press, USA.

De Pelsmacker, P., van Tilburg, S. and Holthof, C., 2018. Digital marketing strategies, online reviews and hotel performance. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 72, pp.47-55.

Deloitte. 2018, Mobile Consumer Survey 2017. [Online]. Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/au/mobile-consumer-survey (Accessed: 20 July 2018).

Elliot, S., Khazaei, A. and Durand, L., 2016, ‘Measuring dimensions of brand influence for tourism products and places’, International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, 10(4), pp.396-409.

Eriksson, P. and Kovalainen, A., 2015. Qualitative methods in business research: A practical guide to social research. Sage.

Hilton hotel. 2018,.About us. [Online]. Available at: https://www.hiltonsydney.com.au/about-our-hotel (Accessed: 20 July 2018).

Jackson, G. and Ahuja, V., 2016, ‘Dawn of the digital age and the evolution of the marketing mix’, Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, 17(3), pp.170-186.

Kannan, P.K., 2017. Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), pp.22-45.

Reilly, T.M. and Jones, R., 2017. Mixed methodology in family business research: Past accomplishments and perspectives for the future. Journal of Family Business Strategy.

Soliman, S.G., 2016, ‘Enhancing Hospitality Facilities via Information Technology in the Egyptian Hotels’, International Journal of Heritage, Tourism, and Hospitality, 10(1/2).

Tao, Q.S. and Hahn, K., 2016. Self-Construals, Types of Social Media Usage, and Consumer Decision-Making Styles--A Study of Young Asian Americans.

Tiago, M.T.P.M.B. and Veríssimo, J.M.C., 2014. Digital marketing and social media: Why bother?. Business Horizons, 57(6), pp.703-708.

Trading economics, 2018, Australia Consumer Spending. [Online]. Available at: https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/consumer-spending (Accessed: 20 July 2018).