Marketing Services

Module Lecturer: Fatimah Moran
Module Leader: Linda Phillips

Assignment

by
Andreas Schmale

Table of Contents

Introduction ... 1

1. Proposal for a new service ... 1

1.1. Market research ... 1
a. Minimizing risk ... 1
b. Area of stay ... 1

1.2. The service offer ... 2
a. Core and secondary service offer ... 2

1.3. The Shostack molecular model ... 3

1.4. The service Blueprint ... 3

1.5. The service characteristic ... 5

2. The potential target market ... 6

2.1. Segmentation and targeting ... 6
a. Private persons (Age 15-60) ... 6
b. B2B and B2 non-profit/social customer ... 6

2.2. Concentrated approach ... 6

2.3. Positioning and competition ... 7

3. The service strategy ... 8

3.1. Product ... 8
a. Core and secondary service ... 8
b. Service encounter ... 8
c. Service quality ... 9
d. Service intermediarie ... 9

3.2. Price ... 11
a. Price discrimination by type of buyer ... 11

3.3. Place ... 11

3.4. Promotion ... 11
a. Promotion mix ... 11

3.5. People ... 12
a. Employees and Customer ... 12

3.6. Proce ... 12
a. Monitoring performance ... 12
b. Critical incident ... 12
c. Feedback system ... 13

3.7. Physical evidence ... 13

4. Conclusion ... 14

5. Bibliography ... 15

Introduction

How to plan a day in a foreign city? Have you ever felt lost in a megacity? How can I find out what attractions are waiting for me and how can I get there?

This report is based on an experience I have had. We were planning a daytrip to an English city where we had been never before. We tried to figure out what the city could offer us and what the different attractions would cost and when they close. After more than two hours searching on the web we decided that we have to go without knowing what we will see. We found it especially difficult to figure out where the attractions were located in the city and how long it would take us to come from one point to another. We only found out by accident that one attraction was half an hour out of the town centre at the edge of the city. We asked ourselves again: How do you plan a day in a foreign city?

The following part is the elaboration of a ciy-day-trip planner and explains especially the marketing aspects for this service.

1. Proposal for a new service

1.1. Market research

a. Minimizing risk

To minimize the risk of a failing business the market research is a systematic approach which helps to find out more about the customer when plans are being made (Woodruffe, 1995). For my service it was important to find out how many people could use this service and if this is a growing or a dying market. The alongside table is limited to the UK. It shows how the number of short stays form 1-3 nights increased by 39 percent in the last few years to 12.8 million in 2005.

b. Area of stay

Our customers are mostly those who are staying only for a few days and who want to get know the country. Therefore they don’t go to the highlands or the sea but to the main cities. London remained the most popular city for overseas visitors. Just over half of all visits to the UK included an overnight stay (25.3 million) involved at least one night in the capital (13.9 million visits). These stays had spending of £6.9 billion associated with them. The most popular place outside of London to stay overnight was Edinburgh (1.0 million visits), followed by Manchester (0.8 million) and Birmingham (0.7 million). My service will be limited to the main cities of a country and is thereby a great service to plan a day in a foreign city. (All information from Office for National Statistics, Newport)

(Figure 1: Overseas residents’ visits - Contained in download version)

( Figure 2: Overseas residents Top towns visited (excluding London) by number of overnight visits 2005 - Contained in download version)

1.2. The service offer

a. Core and secondary service offers

The following figure shows how the service is built and what secondary services are around the main service. It is critical to say, that services are often seen as a whole (Palmer, 2005). The inseparability of services makes the figure less meaningful. The main advantage of my service is for example, that it bundles all the different services on one place in the web so that the customer get an high quality research overview.

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