Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing is the views of consumer as rational decision makers who care about functional features and benefits. According to Experiential marketing (2008), there are four key characteristics in traditional marketing. The following are:

• Focus on functional feature and benefit

Functional feature and benefit are the important factors for the customers when they are selecting the products in the market. Customers will weigh the functional features in terms of their important and compare the advantages of the products. Then, they can base on the overall utility to select their product.

In this part, hotel industry can be the example to explain why traditional marketing will more focus on functional feature and benefit. Nowadays, there are different types of hotel over the world. When the customers were choosing the hotel for travelling, they will not only focus on the size of hotel or the location of hotel. They will also consider of what facilities the hotel provided and the levels of service. Based on those considerations, customers will select the highest overall utility. Therefore, functional feature and benefit will often be our main consideration when we are choosing the products in our daily life.

• Product category and competition are narrowly defined

In the traditional marketing, it will have different competition in the products or in the brand. In Hospitality industry, Hilton Worldwide Hotel will completely against Marriot Hotel because they are offering the similar service and the similar the product category in the market.

• Customers are viewed as rational decision makers

Customers decision making is a process that customer identify their needs, information collecting, product choice and make the purchase decision (Baines, Fill & Page, 2011). These processes are included five stages; need recognition information research, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post-purchase behavior. Through the process of customers decision making, marketers can understand more about the customer behavior that effectively affect the performance of the company. Based on these five stages on hospitality industry, customers need to have recognition of the hotel and think of which types of hotel that they want for their trip through the advertisement or online research. Then, customers will do the research of the hotel, such as previous experiences or consult from their friends and families which can affect them to consideration of hotel. Through all the hotel research, customers can evaluate and choose the most suitable hotel in their trip. Then, they will purchase for their hotel depend on the research and the selection that they made in the previous step. Finally, they will evaluate the hotel satisfaction, such as the quality and the levels of service. They will also evaluate the hotel is suitable of their original needs. Therefore, it will influence their future decision and buying behaviors.

• Methods and tools are analytical, quantitative and verbal

Analytical, quantitative and verbal are the important methodology in the traditional marketing, such as regression models. This method can effectively consist of collecting the verbal ratings in interviews or surveys. However, marketers can base on the amount of predictors to predict the customers’ purchase or choice in the market.

References

Experiential marketing. (2008).Strategic Direction, 24(10), 24-26. doi:10.1108/02580540810907092

Baines, P., Fill, C., & Page, K. (2011).marketing (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.