The effects of co-marketing on the hotel industry

Literature review According to Kurtz, MacKenzie and Snow (2009), co-marketing describes the practice where two individual entities companies create and jointly develop a new product, service or brand (and normally jointly promote it). Co-op advertising is usually the most common practice of comarketing, and nearly all manufacturers and service companies use co-op (Clark, 2000). However there are certain particularities of this practice that have to be taken into consideration when applied in the hospitality industry, due to the differences of tourism marketing from traditional, commercial marketing (Clark, 2000). Services are seen as experiences from a clients point of view. It is the sum of everything that happens to him or her in connection with a transaction or series of transactions. Services, including hospitality services, differ from goods in several aspects (Lovelock, 1996). Among the main hospitality service characteristics that are taken into consideration when developing marketing strategies are intangibility, people as part of the product, demand patterns, perishability, high fixed costs and channel distributions (Hsu, Powers, 2001). Also, when creating a marketing strategy, you have to consider the market demand in hospitality which is different, and can be described under four key settings: business travel demand, leisure travel demand, domestic travel demand, international travel demand (Bowie, Buttle, 2004). Coming back to the notion of co-marketing, if customers expect to relate to the destinations they choose rather than be cocooned in a resort environment, then joint branding and marketing is obviously a must. Collaboration is also encouraged by the development of sustainable tourism awareness. In most cases sustainable futures in travel and tourism mean better collaboration between the commercial and public sector players at any destination. (Middleton, Fyall, Morgan and Ranchhod, 2009)

Hypothesis 1. A hotel will have an increase in the number of its clients when it will offer tourist packages that have other activities included which will bring added value to the package, as perceived by the clients. 2. The attractiveness of a certain region/resort will increase if players from different areas of the hospitality industry will collaborate and create new tourism products.

Research method This study was based on a quantitative research, the instrument chosen was a questionnaire that was applied online on a number of 10 students from the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi. Based on the results of the questionnaires, the following interpretations can be made: the main reason to travel is for rest and relaxation (70%) people often take into account the price , the attractiveness of the resort/city (6 pax each) and the event and activities available (5 pax each) 70% of the people questioned consider its more useful for a product to include more the elements that people want to be included in a tourist package is the all-inclusive element (7 pax), activities and events (4 pax each) people will generally pay the same (50%) or less (40%) for a package with more elements included in order to create qualitative products, a collaboration between different firms and investment in hotels are seen as main factors 90% of the people questioned believe that these kind of collaborations will bring more tourists to the destination the main risks seen are bad image, higher change of getting a poor service, degradation of infrastructure and higher crowd in the destination

Future directions of study Taking into account the results of the questionnaire, we can affirm that both hypotheses were confirmed. As a recommendation for a future study regarding this matter, a larger quantitative research must be done, and also these hypotheses should be studied separately, approached in more detailed questionnaires, because they address two different stakeholders (tourists and hospitality entities). Also during the quantitative research, I recommend to make a small scale experiment regarding this issue.

Bibliography: Bowie, David and Buttle, Francis Hospitality marketing: an introduction, 2004 Hsu, Cathy and Powers Thomas, Marketing hospitality, 2001 Middleton, Victor; Fyall, Alan; Morgan, Michael; Ranchhod, Ashok Marketing in Travel and Tourism Clark, Shawn, The co-marketing solution, 2000 Kurtz, David L.; MacKenzie H. F; Snow, Kim. Contemporary Marketing, 2009