Diploma Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Tourism - Hotel Management, grade: 1,0, University resin university for applied sciences, language: English, abstract: Brands are a phenomenon that has been in existence already for centuries. From its original purpose of marking livestock, the concept was later adopted by manufacturers for their products and further developed and adapted to changes in business environments. The original idea of using marks to indicate ownership and origin, however, can be traced back even for millennia to ancient Greek and Rome and early Chinese dynasties. These days, the number of brands is greater than ever. More and more businesses have come to realize the power of brands, and the concept of brand management has consequently gained considerable interest in recent years. Every year the number of new brands registered increases. Fortune magazine suggests that "In the 21st century, branding ultimately will be the only unique differentiator between companies." Initially, the use of brands, or marks respectively, was limited to physical products only. Service brands are comparatively new in the long history of branding. The hotel industry – along with many other services – is lagging behind manufactured goods by decades. For this reason, research on brand management mainly concentrates on this type of products. Literature on service brands is comparatively scarce. Nonetheless, there are great potentials for brand management in the service industry in general and the hotel industry in particular. Hotel services differ from physical goods in many ways. For this reason, research findings and approaches to building and managing brands cannot simply be transferred. The major goal of this work is therefore to examine the concept of brand management, to adapt and apply it to hotel services. In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, customer loyalty is a hot topic. The hotel industry has turned into a buyer’s market. Competition keeps intensifying at steady pace, resulting in a surplus of capacities. As a consequence, the importance of making guests return becomes a critical issue. It is said that brands provide the opportunity to encourage the creation of loyalty among consumers. In comparison to generic products, they are believed to have an advantage in achieving this goal. A second objective of this work is to determine the connection between these two concepts and to investigate the beneficial effects of branding hotel services for the process of establishing loyalty.

Loyalty is one of the main assets of a brand. In today’s markets, achieving and maintaining loyal customers has become an increasingly complex challenge for brands due to the widespread acceptance and adoption of diverse technologies by which customers communicate with brands. Customers use different channels (physical, web, apps, social media) to seek information about a brand, communicate with it, chat about the brand and purchase its products. Firms are thus continuously changing and adapting their processes to provide customers with agile communication channels and coherent, integrated brand experiences through the different channels in which customers are present. In this context, understanding how brand management can improve value co-creation and multichannel experience—among other issues—and contribute to improving a brand’s portfolio of loyal customers constitutes an area of special interest for academics and marketing professionals. This Special Issue explores new areas of customer loyalty and brand management, providing new insights into the field. Both concepts have evolved over the last decade to encompass such concepts and practices as brand image, experiences, multichannel context, multimedia platforms and value co-creation, as well as relational variables such as trust, engagement and identification (among others).

As hyper-personalization has yet to be perfected, developing hyper-personalized strategies presents a critical challenge; due to this, optimizing hyper-personalization and designing new processes and business models takes center stage in tourism and hospitality to reach new levels of customer service and experience through the introduction and development of new solutions supported in the internet of things, software interfaces, artificial intelligence solutions, back-end and front-end management tools, and other emergent business intelligence strategies. Optimizing Digital Solutions for Hyper-Personalization in Tourism and Hospitality serves as an essential reference source that emphasizes the importance of hyper-personalization models, processes, strategies, and issues within tourism and hospitality fields with a particular focus on digital IT solutions. More than a simple starting point for a critical reflection on the state of the art of this sector, this book aims to contribute in an objective way to leveraging digital solutions to optimize the concept of hyper-personalization in the tourist experience. The content of this book covers research topics that include digital tourism and hospitality, consumer behavior, customer journey, and smart technologies and is ideal for professionals, executives, hotel managers, event coordinators, restaurateurs, travel agents, tour directors, policymakers, government officials, industry professionals, researchers, students, and academicians in the fields of tourism and hospitality management, marketing, and communications.

U.S. corporations now lose half their customers in five years, half their employees in four, and half their investors in less than one. The Loyalty Effect reveals the secrets of successful companies which base their business strategies on loyal relationships. Reichheld lays out the principles that connect value creation, loyalty, growth, and profits, and shows how great companies have used these principles to build loyal customers, loyal employees, and loyal owners.

This open access book is the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 28th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER21@yourplace virtual conference January 19–22, 2021. This book advances the current knowledge base of information and communication technologies and tourism in the areas of social media and sharing economy, technology including AI-driven technologies, research related to destination management and innovations, COVID-19 repercussions, and others. Readers will find a wealth of state-of-the-art insights, ideas, and case studies on how information and communication technologies can be applied in travel and tourism as we encounter new opportunities and challenges in an unpredictable world.

The most important assets of any business are intangible: its company name, brands, symbols, and slogans, and their underlying associations, perceived quality, name awareness, customer base, and proprietary resources such as patents, trademarks, and channel relationships. These assets, which comprise brand equity, are a primary source of competitive advantage and future earnings, contends David Aaker, a national authority on branding. Yet, research shows that managers cannot identify with confidence their brand associations, levels of consumer awareness, or degree of customer loyalty. Moreover in the last decade, managers desperate for short-term financial results have often unwittingly damaged their brands through price promotions and unwise brand extensions, causing irreversible deterioration of the value of the brand name. Although several companies, such as Canada Dry and Colgate-Palmolive, have recently created an equity management position to be guardian of the value of brand names, far too few managers, Aaker concludes, really understand the concept of brand equity and how it must be implemented. In a fascinating and insightful examination of the phenomenon of brand equity, Aaker provides a clear and well-defined structure of the relationship between a brand and its symbol and slogan, as well as each of the five underlying assets, which will clarify for managers exactly how brand equity does contribute value. The author opens each chapter with a historical analysis of either the success or failure of a particular company's attempt at building brand equity: the fascinating Ivory soap story; the transformation of Datsun to Nissan; the decline of Schlitz beer; the making of the Ford Taurus; and others. Finally, citing examples from many other companies, Aaker shows how to avoid the temptation to place short-term performance before the health of the brand and, instead, to manage brands strategically by creating, developing, and exploiting each of the five assets in turn

This book examines issues and implications of digital and social media marketing for emerging markets. These markets necessitate substantial adaptations of developed theories and approaches employed in the Western world. The book investigates problems specific to emerging markets, while identifying new theoretical constructs and practical applications of digital marketing. It addresses topics such as electronic word of mouth (eWOM), demographic differences in digital marketing, mobile marketing, search engine advertising, among others. A radical increase in both temporal and geographical reach is empowering consumers to exert influence on brands, products, and services. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and digital media are having a significant impact on the way people communicate and fulfil their socio-economic, emotional and material needs. These technologies are also being harnessed by businesses for various purposes including distribution and selling of goods, retailing of consumer services, customer relationship management, and influencing consumer behaviour by employing digital marketing practices. This book considers this, as it examines the practice and research related to digital and social media marketing.