The Marketing Mix

Place

Marriott has hotels in a lot of countries like the USA, Thailand, Argentina and so on. There are also three Marriotts in the Netherlands, all of them are in Amsterdam.

The hotels are located in all kind of places. There are hotels next to the highway, nearby the airport and there are also hotels in the centrum of cities. This can mean that the Marriott wants to attract all kind of people. Bussiness people will stay in hotels next to the highway or nearby the airport and the hotels nearby the airport will also attract travallers who have to wait a long time before there next flight is leaving. The hotels in the centrum of cities will mostly be filled by tourists who are on a citytrip. Although, you can't deduce the target group on the base of the place.

Promotion.

There are a lot of ways to promote a hotel. Nowadays one of the most important ways to promote a brand, in this case a hotel, is on the internet. Marriott has a extensive and clarifying internet site. It has a lot of information for the customers and you can also book online. But ofcourse there are lots of other ways to promote a hotel.

First of all we want to say that we think that the Marriott most of all wants to re-attract the customers they already ''have''. Of course they also want to attract new customers, but we expect that the Marriott in their promotion campaigns most of all wants to attract the customers they already have. That has consequences for their promotion campaigns. You can also see this on the internet site. For example the site says "Live it up this summer. Stay the weekend, pay with your Visa card and get a $25 Visa gift card". Marriott also sends regular customers letters and e-mails with special offers.

We haven't found any ways how the Marriott tries to attract new customers but we guess that they try to do that with banners on internet sites and folders at Tourist Information Offices.

Product

The core product of the Marriott are their hotels, or better specified, their rooms. Marriott has different kind of hotels, they have the following brands:
* Marriott Hotels and Resorts
* JW Marriott Hotels and Resorts
* Renaissance Hotels
* Courtyard* Residence Inn
* Fairfield Inn
* Conference Centers
* TownePlace Suites
* Springhill Suites
* Marriott Vacation Club

Each brand has its own style or theme. For example we take Residence Inn. We visited two Residence Inn hotels and what mostly attracted our attention is that they have a really cousy lobby. It was a quite and cousy place with comfortabel couches. That's why we think Residence Inn's target group is elder people because it's a calm place to stay.

All of the brands have the same concept, but they are specified to places and target group. We think that that is what the Marriott makes so strong. They have one concept, but they found a way to make that concept work in different places and for different people. That way they can attract a lot of customers.

Price

Every Marriott brand has a different price. That's because the different brands want to attract different people. For example they can ask a high price from business people because their rooms are mostly paid by the company they work for. So business people don't really care about the price. But on the other way families want to pay as less as possible because they already have a lot of costs. The price also depends on the fact if the brand has more facilities like "Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa".

Unfortunately we weren't allowed to ask the customers questions. So we couldn't ask what they think about the price/quality ratio of the Marriott. Our guess is that most of the customers are satisfied about this because Marriott is a big company and they have lots of customers. They wouldn't have so many customers if the customers weren't satisfied with with what they get for their money.

Staff

Because we weren't allowed to ask the customers questions, we also haven't had much contact with the staff of the Marriott. So we don't really know how they try to assign the concept to the customers.

Made by Petra