Branding of Travel Agency Business- A Research Paper
BRANDING OF TRAVEL AGENCY
BUSINESS
Name of the journal- Journal of emerging technologies
ISSN No.- 23495162
Date of Publication- October 2018
Journal type- Online
Link-
http://www.jetir.org/view?paper=JETIR1810514
Abstract : Study is based on Branding of travel agency business and its
products, the role played by Internet, Travel aggregators, Social media, Print
media, Mobile applications, Content of website etc. in promoting the brand.
Travel and tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world hence
lot of travel agencies have also established which created lot of competition
and rivalry in every market hence it become mandate for individual to think out
of the box in order to create brand value among the target audience. Present
study can be utilized for implementation towards development of beginner till
well established travel small medium entrepreneurs.
According to Kotler and Armstrong (2006), brand building and management
are essential skills in the marketing of any product, service, organization,
person, place or cause. A brand is not just the name put an offering; it is the
driving force that shapes the marketing mix, and provides a platform for an
organization’s strategies and tactics.
In KEYWORDS: Branding, Travel agency business, Branding through different channels, Departments responsible for branding of organization, Steps required to lead the market
1. INTRODUCTION
“Branding” as a word originated in medieval England
where it was referred to the practice of marking the products
with a hot iron as a
means of establishing proof of ownership.
Since travel
has grown with rapid speed in last few years and travel agency is the single
gateway where one can buy and enjoy all travel products under a single roof.
Hence development of travel and tourism gave birth to lot of travel agencies in
recent past which created lot of
competition among rival companies. Some of them able to succeed while some of them are limited till SME business while
some of them was unable to go with buyer behavior and their business was
shuttered down. While we discuss about the most popular brand the names which
comes first are Makemytrip.com and Yatra.com while lot of new companies like
Goibibo.com, Viaworld.in have started giving competition to old brands. Hence
it become mandate for every player to play as per consumer needs and move 1
step ahead of his rival.
In the tourism
destination context, six benefits of branding were identified by Clarke (2000):
(1) tourism is typically a high involvement activity, branding helps to reduce
the choice; (2) branding helps in reducing the impact of intangibility; (3)
branding conveys consistence across multiple outlets and through time; (4)
branding can reduce the risk factors attached to decision making about a
holiday; (5) branding facilitates precise segmentation; (6) branding helps to
provide a focus for the integration of producer efforts, helping people to work
towards the same outcome.
According to
Kotler and Armstrong (2006), brand building and management are essential skills
in the marketing of any product, service, organization, person, place or cause.
A brand is not just the name put an offering; it is the driving force that
shapes the marketing mix, and provides a platform for an organization‟s
strategies and tactics.
2. MARKETING VS BRANDING
Usually
researchers get confuse between marketing and branding. In marketing, companies
usually speak about themselves, what they are, why they are better from others
etc basically marketing is a push tactic. Its pushing out message in order to
generate sales. Where Branding is completely different than marketing, it‟s a pull factor brand simply says “That is what I am. That is why I exist,
buy me if you like me”.
Marketing may
insist you to buy but once you buy from supplier suppose a holiday package from
Thomas cook and they make you feel like king during your entire trip then you
will become their loyal customer for lifetime then it will be considered as
your priority brand for life. (Tronviggroup.com)
That’s the
reason why management studies focus on serving customer rather than giving
priority to just expanding customer base. Good customer service in itself is
marketing for future bookings. If we keep customers happy then they will keep
us in business for longer time.
Happy
customers not just make repeat visits instead they also praise and recommend
good product to their family and friends. It said that customer with good
recommend to 1 while customer with bad experience will tell to 10. Hence
multiple good reviews give birth to brand value.
For example
Royal Enfield motorcycle company hardly spend money on marketing but still they
sell much more units than their rival companies is just because of brand value
which they had created in past.
Similarly
inspite of knowing the fact that Thomas cook, Kuoni or SOTC group are much more
expensive than other travel companies. Peoples still buy from them and these
companies still manage to generate business in this competitive era is just
because of their customer satisfaction strategy. Rather than expanding business
and earning more money from more customers they prefer to charge more from
small bunch of customers and in return assure them hustle free memorable trip.
Blog – Ask your customers to write a blog about your service or product so that he can share his experience in brief with others.
Focus on customer service – Instead of
cost cutting travel agent should insist on providing best memories which make
customer remember his trip throughout his life. Few creative ideas like
complimentary flower decoration for honeymoon couple, Assurance phone calls,
Complimentary add on sight seeing points or any surprise add on or special
event make him feel special. Just imagine you visit Taj mahal and
there is a long queue at entrance gate but your travel agency representative
arrange VIP entry for you without standing in long queues or Imagine
you visit London for vacation and there is a Cricket event going on and
your travel agent gives you a surprise complimentary ticket for VIP
lounge. These few add on things makes travel agent exceptional than others which
add brand value in customer’s eye.
Social Media – World wide tourists use social media during and
before their trip hence it become mandate to stay active on social media.
Create your company page and ask your customers to share their experience over
there. Further you can act smart and you may opt for paid marketing
to promote your page once you realize that your page have lot of good reviews.
Mobile applications – Since your motive is to give ease to your
loyal customers so you should focus on easy accessibility of your products.
Most of consumers use smart phones in today‟s era hence Android or I-phone apps
gives easy accessibility to your products and boost to your business.
Work on specialization – Since lot of suppliers are already
available in market for every product, Hence target a potential area and become
specialize for that particular product instead of focusing on providing
economical services.
Destination Branding – Offer tourist destination details in your
newsletter or on your website free of cost which helps you to gain confidence
of travelers that you hold expert knowledge about destinations which makes you
stand different from others in market.
4. DEPARTMENTS RESPONSIBLE FOR BRANDING OF ORGANIZATION
Business Analyst
Analyzing
business plays a crucial role in development or maintenance of organization's
image like What are the reasons if brand name is declining in the market? What
are the strategies adopted by rival brands? IVR structure of rival brand vs our
IVR? Feedback of customer vs scope of improvement? Analyze growth/decline in
charge back or Airline debit memo cases and find reasons to cope up with
problem? Analyze customer satisfaction and first point resolution rating of
organization.
Brand image
can be analyzed by several ways like analyzing current and previous metrics of
various reports. Working on projects using six sigma techniques which will help
you to minimize loss (Product per million)
Search engine optimization (SEO)
This
department closely works with search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.
Their job is to up to date crawlers and keywords of website so that company‟s
website may reach to right audience. For example you insert cheap flights on
Google and xyz company comes on top but if they charge a lot makes no sense to
you being a customer. Similarly SEO team has to insert keywords which takes
them to right audience suppose you specialize in Goa packages so you should
focus on such keywords like best seller for Goa packages so that customer can
reach you and read blogs and reviews on your website which will help him to
trust you as a brand.
Pay per click (PPC)
You might had
notice that first 3 advertisements on Google are paid and Google sell them with
bid for consumers in particular location which helps you to find customer base
in heavy competitive market. These advertisements are usually listed before
free advertisements hence there are more
chances of conversion. You may use PPC service even if your crawlers or content
of website is not relevant to customer‟s search. Or in other words I would say
you are basically bribing search engine to list you on top.
Social Media Optimization
This division
is basically responsible for all activities of on behalf of organization at
Social media since this is the best and most cost effective method for Branding
and Marketing in today‟s era. And employees of SMO team are responsible for
maintenance of social pages, revert on
queries, posting upcoming events, attracting more users to like page, offering
out of the box information like destination information, best places to visit
etc and overall reputation of organization at social media.
Content writing (Marketing team)
Attractive
slogans attract more and more consumers like tag line of Make my trip.com 'Memories Unlimited' or their new tag
line 'Dil Toh Roaming Hai' attracted
lot new consumers equally the way you draft your products , your website
content makes all difference. Use of powerful, attractive words allow you to
stand out of the mob.
The most
important key deliverable area for all the departments is to be up to date with
current market trend. For example Royal Enfield motorcycles (Famous for cruiser
motorcycles) not spend money on advertising and marketing but they was aware of
change in consumer preferences which gave birth to different segment with
launch of “Royal Enfield Himalayan” motorcycle. This example indicate that even
if you are a well known brand you still have to keep analyzing current trends
of market and do necessary amendments in your products / strategy in order to
keep your brand name alive.
5. DIGITAL BRANDING
Due to less
involvement of cost most of travel agents have continued their work online
which created lot of chaos hence everyone won‟t able to demonstrate their name
as popular brand for longer duration because of new technology and facilities
adopted and offered by rival websites. Hence useful links, effective web
contents, quality of your product, quick online customer service assistance
through web chat, effective e-newsletters makes all difference.
Digital branding is a term for the branding of
products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also
including mobile phones, display advertising, televisions, radio and any other
digital medium .
Digital
Branding is the next wave of development online and offline. For the effective
online (Internet) Branding strategy Rowley(2004) gave the online brand
development strategy which bifurcated into stages like setting the context of
brand, deciding of brand objectives and message: developing a brand design,
creating the website and other communications using the brand, launching and
promoting the brand, building the
brand experience and finally reviewing, evolving and protecting the brand.
Technological progress and tourism
have been going hand in hand for years (Poon,1993; Sheldon, 1997). Basically
Digital branding is composed of new technologies like creative ideas in
development of television or Radio advertisements in order to attract
customers, Virtual tours on social media or company‟s website.
|
Gender |
|
|
Male |
68 |
|
Female |
32 |
|
Age (in
years) |
|
|
18-27 |
36 |
|
28-37 |
26 |
|
38-47 |
22 |
|
48-57 |
10 |
|
58-67 |
4 |
|
67+ |
2 |
|
States of Origin |
|
|
New Delhi |
60 |
|
Other Indian States |
30 |
|
Outside
India |
10 |
|
Education levels |
|
|
Secondary
& Higher Secondary school |
37 |
|
Bachelor Graduate |
43 |
|
Masters
Graduate |
20 |
|
Total
household income (in INR) |
|
|
19,999 or less |
28 |
|
20,000-39,999 |
33 |
|
40,000-59,999 |
17 |
|
60,000-79,999 |
14 |
|
80,000 or
above |
8 |
|
Branding strategies |
Strongly Disagree |
Disagree |
Average |
Agree |
Strongly
Agree |
|
|
(In Percentages) |
||||||
|
Q1 |
Would you prefer to go with brand while planning a
trip |
2 |
9 |
30 |
48 |
11 |
|
Q2 |
Brand name doesn't matter
as long as Travel agency is offering cheaper price as compare to others |
10 |
16 |
49 |
16 |
9 |
Google it –
You become brand by your reputation and nowadays brand value is decided by
Google “You are what Google says you are” quite funny but true. Most of peoples
first of all Google your name in order to see your reviews and results offered
by Google attract or distract consumer. So one should focus on social media
reviews, blogs, customers reviews/blogs on social media or travel aggregator
websites like Tripadvisor, kayak etc since most of the results are fetch by Google.
Average position is not an option for you
being a Brand, Its upto you how you makes difference between yourself and your
rival brands.
A survey indicates that a average
American spend 4.7 hours in a day on their smart phones (http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/informate-
report-social-media-smartphone-use/) and
probably most of the time they spend is on non voice activities hence sticking
with limited Digital media like television, radio, LED hoardings, Drone holding
hoardings is not enough. You need to be everywhere you need to be active on
Twitter, Facebook, Mobile applications, Whats app, You tube, phone calls etc.
You may shot a step by step documentary video containing latest events, your specialization, products and services offered by you and upload it on Youtube.
Since most of
customers immediately gives you a call in case of query so make sure to answer
every single call this is one of monster opportunity.
And most
important is to make sure that you are consistently active since current trend
may change and something might come new in
market next week so keep uploading new videos, posts, updations in app /
website and so on and make sure to be available 24*7 since travel is a dynamic
business and your customer might need your assistance anytime.
If content is
King then attention is god. Your brand needs to be everywhere in order to seek
attention you need to become celebrity
in digital media world. You might do radio shows, video shows, repeat digital
activities and so on since we cannot stick with a single medium for communication. For example at the
time of political elections politicians capture all television or radio
channels for advertisements hence most of consumers avoid watching televisions
or listening radio in those days.
6.
USE AN EXISTING BRAND TO CREATE YOUR OWN BRAND
As we studied
that it is not that easy to become or to maintain a brand image without moving
along with market trend. So here we will discuss about other strategies that
will help to boost business from very beginning. One can use name of existing
brand‟s image using General sales agent, Preffered channel partner, Franchise
services depending on the conditions of the
provider.
Since you know
that Thomas cook and Make my trip are big brands but both of them don‟t provide
franchise to local agents to run their business under their name wherein Make
my trip just provide their services to agents through B2B portal and offline
activities (General sales agent) while Thomas cook provide both general sales
agent and proffered channel partner services under general sales agent Thomas
cook or make my trip allow travel agency to sell their products along with his
products.
Wherein
Franchise or preffered channel partner is completely different, under this
service your agency will be acting as a Thomas
cook outlet under customer‟s impression and your outlet will be marketed
under Thomas cook company‟s name on their website, newsletter and all other
advertisements means you will be working on behalf of an existing brand so you
don‟t have to fight for branding or marketing since company will take care of
branding and marketing expenses and planning but
you will be bound to sell their products only since you are Thomas cook
under customer‟s impression.
7.
HYPOTHESES FRAMEWORK
Tactics given by Rowley (2004) was followed to achieve best results in branding of travel agency business.
H1: Brand building strategies should be given more priority through new and creative ideas.
H2: Developing a business plan is the most important strategy for
branding.
H3: Present trend followed by travel agencies to promote their brand
is up to the mark.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Lot of
confusion was roaming around while doing literature review hence we have
conducted a survey in order to get best results about consumers preferences. A
self generated questionnaire survey was conducted at Delhi Haat, Pitamura and
Connaught place, New Delhi. 50 respondants was selected randomly. The
questionnaire with Likert scale responses was developed to measure the study
constructs. Subjects were asked to rate their agreement with each item on a
five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 = disagree to 5 = agree. To analyze the
data.
RESEARCH FINDINGS
Profile of
respondents is mention in below mention table. It was found that gender consist
68% Male and 32% Female. Majority of age group was 18-27 years consist of 36%
and majority of respondents are residents of New Delhi itself consist 60%
followed by 30% from other Indian states and remaining 10% are from outside
India. Educational level of 43% respondents was till Bachelor studies Graduate.
Majority of respondents earn 20,000-39,999 INR per month. The focus area of
research was on mindset of consumer while choosing travel agency.
Above mention
table represent the response rate (in %) of the respondents against Question 1
and 2 respectively. For Question 1 48% respondents agree that they prefer brand
name before buying products while for question 2 49% respondents gave average
response when we ask them if price
matter to them while choosing supplier for their travel needs. For question 1
30% respondents gave average response when they was asked about preference
given to brand name whereas 16% respondents in question 2 gave agree response
when we ask them about cost factor involved.
Hypothesis
H1 and H2 are fully proved by analyzing the response rate of the respondents
for the above mentioned Questions Q1 and Q2.
8.
CONCLUSION
Travel agency
is a gateway for consumer for all his travel needs hence travel agency in
itself create multiple impression among different
customer since all suppliers beat hotelier, airlines, cruise line might not
offer same level of service to the customer hence it become very difficult for
travel agency to maintain its brand image but introduction of several new
travel agencies have created lot of competition in travel agency business hence it be mandatory
job for travel agency to think out of the box since working in a mob is not an
option flying high in the sky is motive hence pull factors to seek customer‟s
attention might be used through social media, travel aggregators, customer
satisfaction techniques, user friendly tools and so on. The convenience of service and 24*7 accessibility, quick
resolution allow customers to repeatedly use your service and good service
create good feedback and happy customers which create repeat business, cost
reduction in marketing and most important a “BRAND”. Business analyst, SEO,
PPC, SMO, Marketing team of travel agency plays a crucial role in development /
maintenance of brand name. Last but not the least, we cannot rely on limited
sources in this modern era hence use of digital technology plays an crucial
role in growth of “BRAND”name.
9.
REFERENCES
• Kotler, 1991
• Pike, 2002; Tasci & Kozak, 2006
• Clarke (2000)
• Kotler and Armstrong (2006)
• Caldwell & Freire, 2004; Okoroafo, 1989
• Ricardo, 2009
• Rowley(2004)
• Poon,1993; Sheldon, 1997
• digitaltrends.com
• Tronviggroup.com
• http://www.eprofitbooster.com/e-branding.php
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_marketing
• Prateek Sapra (2015), Sustainable Competitive advantage through integrated marketing approach, Bharti publications, New Delhi, ISBN-978-93-85000-42-3
• Severe situation of Dal lake, Kashmir (Case Study), Pacific institute of hotel management, Udaipur, Volume-4, Issue-8, July-Dec.‟16, ISSN 2320-1398
• Dixit Saurabh ( 2012), Information Technology in Tourism, APH Publishing Corporation, New Delhi , ISBN- 978-81-313- 1591-0
• Dixit Saurabh (2013), Tourism Hospitality Management for beginners, APH Publishing Corporation, New Delhi , ISBN- 978-93-313-1923-4
• Singh Ratandeep (2008), Tourism Marketing: Principles, Policies and Strategies, Delhi: Kanishka Publishers Distributors.
Comments
Post a Comment