Hospitality Products: Core, Facilitating, Supporting

• Anything offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption that might satisfy a want or need is a product.
• Products include physical objects, services, places, organizations, and ideas.
• A room at the Sogo Hotel, a Hawaiian vacation, McDonald's French Fries, a bus tour in historic sites, and a convention in a modern convention center are all products.
• Hospitality managers need to consider the product on four levels: Core, Facilitating, Supporting, and Augmented Products.

Core Products

• It answers the question of what the buyer is really buying.
• Every product is a package of problem-solving services.
• The main thing that the guests are willing to purchase.

Facilitating Products

• These are services or goods that must be present for the guest to use the core product.
• The presentation of goods and services.
• Enhanced core products.

Supporting Products

• Extras are offered to add value to the core product and to help differentiate it from competitors.
• Additional goods and services.
• Increases the overall utility or value of the product or services.

Augmented Products

• Include lots of added value.
• Accessibility (geographic location and hours of operation).
• Atmosphere (visual, oral, olfactory, and tactile dimension).
• Customer interaction with the service organization (joining, consumption, and detachment).
• Customer participation.
• Customer interaction with one another.

Augmented Products Components: Accessibility

• Refers to how accessible the product is in terms of location and hours of operation.
• Two barriers include hours of operation and a lack of employees' knowledge.

Augmented Products: Atmosphere

• A critical element in services.
• Appreciated through the senses.
• The main sensory channels for atmosphere are sight, sound, scent, and touch.

Sensory Terms

• Sensory terms provide descriptions for the atmosphere as a particular set of surroundings.
  • Visual: Dimensions of atmosphere that includes color, brightness, size, and shape.
  • Aural: Dimensions of atmosphere that includes volume.
  • Olfactory: Dimensions of atmosphere that includes scent and freshness.
  • Tactile: Dimensions of atmosphere are softness, smoothness, and temperature.

Augmented Products: Customer Interactions

• The customer participates in the delivery of most hospitality and travel products. Managers must think about how the customers will use the product in the three phases of involvement: joining, consumption, and detachment.
• Customers become part of the product being offered through interaction with other customers.

Augmented Products: Coproduction

• Involving the guest in service delivering can increase capacity, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce costs.

Branding Strategy

• A brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, design, or combination of these elements that is intended to identify the goods or services of a seller and differentiate them from those competitors.
• Branding is the process of endowing products and services with the power of a brand, by creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers' mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme.

Brand Equity

• An added value endowed on products and services.
• May be reflected in the way consumers think, feel, and act with respect to the brand.

Brand Positioning

• Companies can position brands at any of three levels.
  • Lowest level involves positioning the brand on its product attributes.
  • The brand can associate with desirable benefits
  • Strongest brands go beyond attribute or benefit positioning, positioned on strong belief and values.
• A brand portfolio is the set of all brands and brand particular category or market segment.
• Marketers often need multiple brands in order to pursue these multiple segments.

Managing Brands

• Brands positioning must be continuously communicated to consumers.
• The company should carry out internal brand building to help employees understand and be enthusiastic about the brand promise.
• Companies needs to periodically audit their brand's strengths and weaknesses.

New Product Development Phase

• Idea Generation: Ideas are gained from internal sources, customers, competitors, distributors, and suppliers.
• Idea Screening: The purpose of screening is to spot good ideas and drop poor ones as soon as possible.
• Concept Development and Testing: Surviving ideas must now be developed into product concepts, which are tested with target customers.
• Marketing Strategy Development: The marketing strategy statement has three parts:
  • First Part: Describes the target market, the planned product positioning, and the sales market and share, and profit goals for the first two years.
  • Second Part: Outlines the products planned price, distribution, and marketing budget for the first year.
  • Third Part: Describes the planned long-run sales, profit and the market mix strategy over time.
• Business Analysis: Involves a review of the sales, cost, and profit projections to determine whether they satisfy the company's objectives.
• Product Development: Turns the concept into a prototype of the product.
• Market Testing: The stage in which the product and marketing program are introduced into more realistic market settings.
• Commercialization: The product is brought into the marketplace. Large companies sometimes buy a small restaurant chains rather than develop their own new concept (McDonald's buying Chipotle).
• Purchase distress chains, the mismanagement of a chain, and resulting poor performance can drive the market value of the chain down.
• These chains become attractive targets for companies that believe they can turn them around.

Product Life Cycle Stages

• Product Development: Begins when the company finds and develops new product ideas.
• Introduction: A period of slow phase growth when the product is being introduced into the market, profits are non-existent at this stage.
• Growth: A period of rapid market acceptance and increasing profits.
• Maturity: A period of slowdown in sales growth because the product has achieved acceptance by most of its potential buyers.
• Decline: The period when sales fall off quickly and profits drop.
• Understanding product design and management is crucial in business.
• Companies must continuously innovate and adapt to market trends.