INTRODUCTION
Tourism is more than just the business activity connected with providing accommodation, services and entertainment for people who are visiting a place for pleasure as the Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary says. It is an industry on its own
Tourism is all encompassing. It combines all the activities in transportation; either through the air, land and sea, accommodation; services; side attractions with all the activities that go with them. Being an industry therefore, there must be need for interaction. Hence, the need for marketing with adequate strategies for effective interactions in order to guarantee maximum returns cannot be overemphasized. So this term paper is basically on marketing concept and strategies in tourism. Thus, the definition, the need for marketing, some notable concepts of marketing, characteristics of marketing, and components of strategic marketing, how to design marketing strategies and why some marketing strategies fail will all be examined in relation to tourism.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
Marketing: The American marketing Association defines marketing as the management, planning and executing the conception, prizing, promoting and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals
Marketing is the delivery of customer satisfaction at a profit (Kotler, 2001)
Bhatia(2006) in his book, defines marketing as a business discipline; “as a business discipline, market consists of systematic study of the demand generating or consumer motivating forces, the temporal and spatial considerations influencing economic transaction, and the interacting efforts and responses of buyers and sellers in a market”.
Institute of marketing has defined marketing as “the creative management function which promotes trade and employment by assessing consumer needs and initiating research and development to meet them. It coordinates the resources of production and distribution of goods and services; determines and directs the nature and scale of the total effort required to sell profitably the maximum production to the ultimate user”.
Concept: is an idea or a principle that is connected with something abstract.
Marketing Concept: marketing concept is a simple but very important idea. The marketing concept means that an organization aims all its efforts at satisfying its customers-at a profit (Perrault and McCarthy (2005). Philip Kotler defines the marketing concept as follows: “the marketing concept holds that the key to achieving organizational goals consists in determining the needs and wants of target markets (customers) and delivering the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors”.
Marketing Strategy: A marketing strategy specifies a target market and a related marketing mix. It is a big picture of what a firm will do in some market.
Tourism: Can be defined as a temporary purposeful and guided visitation to a place or places for a period not exceeding one year for leisure, pleasure or treasure.
Tourism Marketing: tourism marketing could be defined as the “systematic and coordinated efforts exerted by the National Tourist organizations and/or the tourist enterprises at international, national and local levels to optimize the satisfaction of tourists, groups and individuals, in view of the sustained tourism growth”.
According to Krippendorf, J., marketing in tourism means “systematic and coordinated execution of business policy by tourist undertaking whether private or state owned at local, regional, national or international level to achieve an appropriate returned”
OLOWOLE, Femi Peter
