The traditional marketing mix of the 4Ps namely product, price, place and promotion was originally seen as largely representative of a tangible market offering. The difference between product and service offerings motivated the need to revise the marketing mix into 7Ps, which now include people, process and physical evidence. This facilitates the inclusion of highly service oriented market offerings (Zeithaml et al., 2006:25-26). The added component of people reflects employees’ level of training, experience, motivation, reward level, teamwork as well as customer dispositions such as education, loyalty and attitude. Physical evidence is an aspect of the mix that encapsulates service facilities and equipment design, signage, employee dress, business cards, reports, transaction statements as well as room ambience and décor. The last one of processes signifies the
flow of service activities and logistics, level of customisation and standardisation as well as customer involvement in the service process.
Other authors have discussed the marketing mix with the aim of developing one specifically for hospitality. Renaghan (1981:31-35) proposed a three-element marketing mix for the sector namely the product service mix, the presentation mix and the communication mix. This was later modified by Brunner’s 4Cs framework of concept mix, cost mix, channel mix and communication mix (Brunner, 1989:72-77). Although there is general support for the 7Ps, different authors have coined different terminologies to the additional 3Ps such as participants for people and programming for processes (Rafiq & Ahmed, 1995:4-15). However, these authors add that the physical evidence component has received least support as most scholars see its argument as largely product oriented, based on the original 4Ps theory of the marketing mix.
Most recently, the 8Ps of hospitality and travel marketing emerged, listing the 8Ps of the hospitality marketing mix as product, partnership, people, packaging, programming, place, promotion and lastly price (Morrison, 2002:249); the new ones being packaging, programming and partnership. Packaging and programming are basically meant to address the creation of the product consumption process while partnership is the focus on potential market support obtainable from other players and strategic alliances and which may help create synergies. Indeed, as Morrison (2002:282) puts it, partnership may be very important in hospitality and tourism as the destination mix theory reveals a wide mix of different businesses such as hotel and catering, travel agents and tour operators, attraction entrepreneurs, airlines and national marketing organisations. Through partnering, hotels may see themselves playing complementary roles together with the other relevant sectors to build greater attractiveness of a destination and thereby better business and profit for the hotel sector in particular.
A study by Akan (1995:39-43) on the elements of hotel service quality, gives a very close reflection of the additional 3Ps of the 7P-marketing mix model. He says that hotel service quality is based on three factors namely, the hotel, the people and the service process. It
is explained that the hotel is mainly the physical hotel, its design, room, furniture and ease of access while the people is mainly focussing on their training, experience, appearance, friendliness, respect and communication ability. Lastly the service process is explained as the total of those elements that include, speed, accuracy, promptness, understanding, quality of the service encounter, attention and understanding. In this aspect, it can be seen that management of the hotel product/service quality may adequately borrow from the 7Ps framework of the service marketing mix as well as the 8Ps concept of the hospitality marketing mix.
The significance of people in the hotel service process cannot be underestimated as according to Zeithaml et al. (2006: 354) people are the service, the brand, the marketers and the organisation in the eyes of customers. The role of employees and their behaviour takes much greater value in a service business than it does in manufactured products (Maxwell, Watson & Quail, 2004:162). These authors add that the need for quality service has catalysed a need for strategic human resource development in the hotel sector.
Issues such as performance appraisal, motivation, rewarding exceptional performance, commitment to the service culture have received great emphasis in the scientific studies on the service quality in hotels (Cheung & Law, 1998:402-406; Pallet, Taylor &
Jayawardena, 2003:349-351; Worsfold, 1999:340-348). The researchers suggest that there is a need to develop a corporate quality and people philosophy, concepts and key principles, as well as a need to train and empower staff to carry out an internal (including personal) quality audit.
Hilton hotels, for example, have recognised the importance of employees in their service provision and have thus included them in their core values alongside three others namely, customers, quality and profit (Human Resource Management, 2004:24-26). It is reported by scholars that the Hilton quality service today is highly related to the behaviour of staff, mainly with guests, but even with each other, which is the right type of organisational culture that encourages appropriate and quality employee/guest exchanges (Maxwell et al., 2004:169). This Hilton case is supplemented by the study on a UK hotel which concluded that the high performance required from service personnel has motivated the
need to have a human resource responsibility amongst top management (Lockyer &
Scholarios, 2004:131).
The centrality of people in a service business is heightened by a study that was carried out on behaviour differentiation in service by Bacon (2005:61-66). According to this author, differentiation has always attracted imitation, especially in the marketing of physical goods. However, he says that service businesses such as hotels, supermarkets, restaurants and banks, could focus on employee behaviour to acquire a people based culture, which is quite often not easy to imitate. In this regard, hotel services at a particular destination could easily be built on the culture of the local people, especially if it stands out as different and better amongst competing tourist destinations.
5.4 THE CONCEPT OF QUALITY AND SATISFACTION IN HOTELS AND