Skills Needed to Succeed as Marketers in Hospitality
By Dr. Mark Legg & Dr. Makarand Mody
Successful Marketing in 2020 and beyond = Operations + Analytics + Attentiveness and Curiosity. Guests today in our industry are being inundated everywhere by advertising. Being able to reach our guests successfully is becoming an increasingly complex task. Marketing today in the hospitality sector is more complicated than ever. As SHA students, you can prepare yourselves by taking SHA electives specifically designed to provide you the skills that help you understand the complexities and thrive in your future marketing roles.
- Be Analytically Minded – No longer can marketers in hospitality rely solely on creativity and expect to succeed. While creativity still plays a large role in success, marketers in our industry have smaller portion of the pie to play with as they are being asked to drive more to the bottom line. This all leads to marketers needing to leverage analytics to improve efficiencies. However, it is not solely about improving efficiencies, but doing so that is sustainable to a firm’s long term strategy and sensible to a firm’s customers. Being analytically minded will be key to your future marketing career. HF 478 Hospitality Analytics builds up your analytical toolset while you practice fundamental analytical methods used in the industry. As you embark on your careers, having the ability to reach into your analytical toolset will allow you to improve efficiencies of marketing initiatives you will be tasked with.
- Don’t Ignore Your Operations – Too often marketers make decisions in a bubble with little regard to how their initiatives impact their operations. Without the support of the operations, costly marketing initiatives can easily fail. This includes promotions such as but not limited to: packaging deals with room bookings to customer service tactics such as upselling guests upon arrival. Marketers must have a keen awareness of how their initiatives impact the operations and to what degree their operations can manage the initiatives with limited impact to their daily tasks. Marketing initiatives that fail to conceptualize at the operational level can lead to disastrous results from both financial and customer relation perspectives. While HF 270 Lodging Operations gives you an overview of operational techniques in the industry, HF 405 Service Operations Research dives further by teaching you methods hotels and restaurants use to improve their operational efficiencies and service flows. Both courses in tandem can give you a broader understanding of operations in our industry.
- Be attentive and curious: While skills in operations and analytics will give you the tools you need to do your jobs efficiently, being observant of what is happening around you and an inherent curiosity to know more (“why does something work the way it does?”) are the skills that will make you a great marketer. Just like the “hard” skills in operations and analytics, attentiveness and curiosity can be learnt. When was the last time you were traveling on the T and stopped to look at the ads plastered on the walls? Or think about why Cheetos would think it’s worth spending $5.6 million for a 30-second Superbowl commercial when it may not even lead to increased sales? Every day, hundreds of marketers try and engage us with their content. As students of marketing, all we have to do it look around us, pay attention to the messages, analyze them, learn from them. While HF 260: Hospitality Marketing Principles gets you started on the journey to think like a marketer, HF 301: Research Methods in Hospitality and Tourism (a Spring elective) focuses on how you can understand consumers better through methods that enhance your attentiveness and your curiosity.