The 7 Ps of Services Marketing in regard to the Freedom Australia Company - Case Study Example

Running Header: Assessment Task (Marketing Report) Student’s Name: Name of Institution: Instructor’s Name: Course Code: Date of Submission: Executive Summary For any business which provides goods and services to consumers to be successful, it must have an effective marketing strategy and plan. A marketing strategy acts as the foundation for ensuring the success of a marketing plan. Behind every successful corporate organization, there lies a strategic marketing plan that has been designed to help the company break through and thrive in the market. A marketing plan usually contains a list of actions that are to be followed by a business so as to be successful in the market. The marketing plan is likely to be ineffective if it does not contain strategies of how the plans will be executed. A marketing strategy is therefore an outline of how a business plans to execute its marketing plan. The 7 Ps of marketing are described as frameworks which can be used by businesses to build up their marketing plans. A business needs to have succinctly defined business objectives that will direct it towards catering for the direct and indirect needs of its customers. These seven Ps of the services market include product, price, promotion, place, people, processes and physical evidence. This report analyzes the tourism ventures of the Freedom Australia Tourism Company by breaking down these ventures into the 7 Ps of services marketing. This paper further gives recommendations for the 7 Ps of services marketing in regard to the Freedom Australia Company. Introduction Freedom Australia is a renowned tour operator based in Australia and New Zealand. The company deals with all issues related to holidays, including offering holiday destination sites, holiday planning services, holiday consultancy services and other touring services. Freedom Australia is known for its variety of services which include accommodation, road touring, rail touring, flights with worldwide stopovers and tailor made holidays for its clients. As part of its diverse accommodation services, Freedom Australia has spacious apartments suited for large families that want to have a homely holiday experience away from home. The company also provides romantic island resorts for couples who might need convenient romantic spots to share their time. There are also superb hotels for the normal holiday experiences and provision of accommodation away from home. At Freedom Australia, customers are given a wide range of choice to pick the exact experiences, tours and accommodation that will suit their unique needs and blend these services together to form a perfect holiday experience. As part of Freedom Australia’s marketing strategy, the tour company lets the customers to pick and choose exactly what they want to do during their holiday. In other words, clients are given the opportunity to choose the activities that they would love to be included in their holiday package and the staff at Freedom Australia will do all the work of arranging all the logistics involved in making the holiday successful. The Freedom Australia personnel arrange everything for their clients after they understand the type of holiday and travel experience that a particular client is interested in. The company aims at meeting the unique needs of all its clients because it respects their diversity and tailor makes all its services in accordance with the unique requirements of its customers. This essay applies the 7 Ps of services marketing to Freedom Australia in an attempt to highlight how the tourism company markets its products. Justification that the company is a service provider In business terms, a service provider can be referred to as a business entity that provides services to customers and other entities. Freedom Australia is part of a leading travel company based in the United Kingdom. Since the company is a business, its main focus is to provide customers with a variety of services that make up a complete holiday experience. One such service includes the provision of accommodation at the different destinations and locations of the company. These range from Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, North and South Queensland, Darwin, Tasmania, Adelaide, Red Centre and the Island resorts among others. Another major service provided by the Freedom Australia tour company is the touring services which include guided or escorted tours, self drive tours, river and reef cruising, rail journeys, car rental services and motorhomes. The company also offers worldwide flight services with several stopovers. All these engagements of the company are services within the tourism sector that are meant to cater for the needs of the tourists. Freedom Australia can also be said to be a service providers because it deals with the provision of specialized services to a selected group of customers who pay for these services so as to enable the company to make profits. The company is also a service provider because it does not deal with the direct production or distribution of particular commodity. The company’s main area of concern is the provision of holiday and tour services to its customers within the tourism sector. Analysis of Tourism Venture using 7 Ps Once a company has a marketing plan that is accompanied by a clear marketing strategy, it can now use the seven Ps formula to evaluate its business activities and practices. These seven Ps must also be revisited and reevaluated on a continuous basis so as to ensure that the company is in line with the changes in the markets, customers and their unique needs. Product In the case of Freedom Australia, the company should seek to promote its services. Since the company does not produce any product directly, this section will talk more about the services provided by Freedom Australia .The services provided by the Freedom Australia are crucial its operations. At Freedom Australia, the services offered include the provision of accommodation at the different destinations and locations of the company. The company provides a very wide range of specialized accommodation services which include spacious apartments, romantic island resorts and superb hotels. There are also city center locations for those customers who prefer having their stays at cities. These are coupled with fireworks displays and special cruises during the new years. The nature and standard of these services is high class to such an extent the good word automatically spreads to families, friends and total strangers who will most probably want to come to Freedom Australia and be part of this experience. The services at Freedom Australia speak for themselves because of the high quality of services that are provided. Another service provided by Freedom Australia is the tour service. Freedom Australia usually offers a variety of services in regard to tours and travels. These services include care rental services where the customers can rent cars and use them during their travels. The customers can also be taken on escorted tours with the personnel from the company who are familiar with them locations that the customers have planned to visit. The other service that is provided by Freedom Australia in regard tours is the self drive tours whereby the customers are given the freedom to drive themselves around on tours. Freedom Australia also offers river and reef cruising services whereby the customers are provided with outdoor equipment for cruising the rivers and the reefs. The customers are taken to beautiful beaches and sites where they can engage in activities such as rock climbing, city sightseeing, visits to the Sydney harbor and other getaways. Rail journeys are also a part of the tours whereby customers pay to be taken on tours using trains. The trains come with special cabins whereby the customers can enjoy their privacy during the trips. There are exquisite meals that are provided on board during the journeys. When the trains make a stopover, there is free accommodation that is provided for every passenger before the journey continues. Freedom Australia also offers motorhomes for it clients who wish to have this kind of experience. Such motorhomes are tailor made trucks which have a special section that is furnished like a home. They allow customers to cruise and drive around their places of choice at the comfort of these trucks which feel like home. These motorhomes also have specialized services such as roadside assistance in case of break downs, navigations systems to guide the tourists during their travels, unlimited distances calculated in kilometers, televisions sets and DVD players among others. They are fully equipped just like homes so as to give the customers the best road trip experience. The last of the services provided by Freedom Australia in terms of tours is the flight with stopovers around the world. The company offers these unique services in state of the art planes that give the customers a unique experience of stopping over at different exciting destinations, a service that they would normally not have experienced. These flights include specialized services such as shopping at different destinations around the world. All these services provided by Freedom Australia Tour Company make it the perfect holiday planner and organizer for any customer who wants to have a different holiday experience that is not easily provided by other companies. These services are crucial to the life of the company and they determine whether t thrives in the tourism market or not. Most customers are usually more than satisfied and happy with the services provided by the company. This is evident by reading all the comments posted by the clients at the company’s website on www.freedomaustralia.co.uk. The customers are excited and they share the great news about the job that the company is doing and the quality of services that it provides. The company has maximized on the services that it provides and therefore enjoys a lot of profits and gets a lot of clients (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). Price Price is also another crucial issue in the operations of any business and companies should strive to get it right the first time. At Freedom Australia, the charges are what the company is worth. The company charges according to the quality of the services that it provides. Discounts are only given where they deserve to be given. Many service providers are sometimes afraid of charging the exact amount that they should be charging even when they provide high quality services. Most of them fear losing out on clients because of charging prices that they feel are high. They therefore end up offering constant discounts that make them earn very minimal profits. This is not good for businesses and experts warn that such trends should be avoided. At the Freedom Australia, this is not the case. Even though there are numerous discounts and offers made to attract customers, the service provider charges what should be charged because it offers high quality services that deserve these charges. The planning services offered by the service provider are absolutely free. The consultants who plan holidays for clients help to put everything in place concerning the customers holidays at no extra cost. The service provider usually comes up with deals during the peak seasons so as to attract customers to use their services as opposed to going to other companies. These deals include packages which have a number of combined activities that have standardize charges. For example, the company has the city, rock and reef deal which involves visiting and staying at beautiful beaches, having stylish accommodation facilities, visiting the Sydney harbor, sightseeing within the city and rock climbing at the Ayers rock and Cairns all for € 595. Other deals include the Sydney New Year’s festivals which include almost similar activities as the city, rock and reef deal but having city centre locations and fireworks displays at € 84 (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). Visitors are also allowed to tour the four state capitals of Australia in a 17 day itinerary that is full of leisure for € 999. They get to experience the lively night-life and the picturesque harbor. They also get to learn about the cultures and ways of life of the inhabitants while they enjoy shopping at the boutiques and having other optional tours. The motorhomes are charged from as low as € 39 per day and the flights with stopovers go from € 699. The company’s pricing strategy is set in such a way that it attracts numerous clients who make it gain a lot of profits by coming in large numbers. That is why the company can afford to have very many special offers, free services and discounts and still make a lot of profit. The flights, accommodations, stopovers, and touring options rates are cheaper as compared to other tour companies within the same region. This helps to gain loyalty among the clients and retain them in the company. Promotion Any service provider, including Freedom Australia, should always have strategies and ways of promoting their services. Promotion in this case will entail all the ways that the service provider should use so as to inform the customers about the services and encourage then to make use of them. Business experts recommend that a business should only promote its products or services when all the other Ps are in place. Here, the service provider needs to know what the company should do and say to the customers so as to encourage them to want to buy the services. At Freedom Australia, there are several promotion strategies that are used to attract, convince and retain customers. For example, Freedom Australia seeks to create awareness among the people about its existence. The company is well advertised across Australia and all over the world through different media like the internet, in business journals, magazines, tourism journals, via cable, on TV, radio, newspapers, brochures and billboards among other medium. All these advertisement efforts are taken with the overall aim of letting the people know that Freedom Australia exists, where it is found, the services that it offers and the prices for each charge. Freedom Australia also promotes its services by having numerous special offers, discounts and deals that attract customers to make use of these services and know that they are not wasting their cash. It is easy for the company to attract and retain customers by using this strategy (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). Freedom Australia also promotes its services by letting the people know that it has a variety of services including facilitating holidays, weddings, hikes, expeditions, sightseeing, honey moons and tours among others. This diversity is a way of promoting the service provider in the sense that the company can cater for the needs of many clients at once. The company also has free holiday planning services which are meant to plan all the itineraries and logistics involved in holidays thus making the clients’ work very easy. The company also has personalized service that allows clients to call the firm and ask for assistance via the phone. Such a service is also meant to promote the company and help the customers with any difficulties that they may have during the course of using the company’s services. The firm’s online presence is also helpful in helping those who did not know about it to do so. The company allows customers to air their views, suggestions and comments online via its website where they can also book for holiday arrangements, flights and other services offered by the company. Place This basically has to do with where (the location) the services are provided to the clients. The place or location is one of the most crucial factors of any business, whether it deals with products, services or both. The place is important because it is all about getting noticed and taking the services to where the people are. At Freedom Australia, the place is also a crucial factor. The company deals with services that include holidays, tours, hikes, sightseeing and flights among others. All these services are offered to different people at different places. The company is therefore centrally located in the city so that the city dwellers other foreigners who wish to explore the country and go on holidays can do so from the convenience of the city. The company also has offices in different regions within the country so as to take care of the needs of those people who live away from the city but still require the services of the company. The company does not have one single place where it sells its services from. It uses catalogs, telemarketing, direct selling, sending of sale persons and through its establishments among other means. However, all these means are meant to act as places where the company does its business from (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). People People are crucial to the business because they are the business. Without people within and outside of the organization, there would be no business. Freedom Australia realizes this and attracts, recruits, hires and retains people based on their skills and competencies. The people are also charged with the responsibility of selling and marketing the business. Freedom Australia strives to get the right people to work for it and help it to realize its goals and objectives. People are therefore an integral part of the success of any organization. Processes Here, the overall goal is to make every process that the clients undergo to be as simple as possible. At Freedom Australia, the personnel strive to do this by the various methods that they have put in place such as the online help services, the personal service through phone calls and the free planning services among others. The company has also made it possible for clients to make booking online, thus relieving them of the stress of booking physically. Physical evidence This has to do with the availability of proof that the company is actually dealing with the services or products it purports to do so. At Freedom Australia, physical evidence has been properly catered for by the fact that it has very many vehicles that it has branded the company name on so that they can be identified as belonging to the company. The company also has tangible accommodation facilities in the form of hotels, apartments and cabins among many others. There are also pictures of all these facilities available at the company’s website so that one can look at them online before seeing them physically (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). PART 2 Recommendations for the 7 Ps of services marketing Product In regard to product, the company should develop a culture of viewing its services as though they were customers and external marketing consultants brought in to help the company boost its services. When the personnel take the place of the customers, they will be able to know what weaknesses their services have because they will know whether they satisfy their customers or not. The company will therefore be able to maximize on its strong points and improve on its weak areas. The company should also conduct surveys to find out whether their services are suitable and appropriate for the market today. They should analyze if their services are in line with the current market trends by looking at what other competitors are doing and borrowing the good while avoiding the bad. They should also seek to establish the customers’ needs by conducting a customer needs assessment so as to be able to satisfy them more. Freedom Australia should also seek ways to promote the existing services that it offers (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). Price In regard to price, the service provider should ensure that it does not offer too many discounts and price cuts that are uncalled for because these will make the company not to get as much profit as it deserves. Freedom Australia should strive to charge what its services are worth so that it can maximize on the profits. The company should not overcharge the customers and neither should it undercharge them for the services they provide. They should strive to strike a balance and maintain it so that they can get constant profits that are fairly high. The company should also be involved in constant examination and evaluation of its prices and price policies so that they are appropriate to the realities in the current market and its trends. The service provider should determine when it is appropriate to raise prices and when to lower them so that they can remain profitable in whatever circumstance. This is because there are times when it is appropriate to lower the prices like off peak seasons and other times when it is appropriate to raise it like peak seasons. The company can also review its pricing policies and the conditions for sale such that it can spread the cost of certain services over a period of time such as a week, a month, two months or any other appropriate period (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). Promotion In regard to promotion, Freedom Australia should seek alternative promotional methods to complement the methods that it is using currently. The company should not focus mainly on price reduction since this strategy may be detrimental if not applied well. The company should experiment with the different ways of promoting and advertising their services and see which way works best for it. The company should realize that even the slightest of changes in promotion strategies can go a long way in ensuring that positive results are obtained. Place In regard to place, Freedom Australia should always review the strategies that it uses to ensure that its presence is all over. It should diversify the locations that it operates from such that it does not depend on only a few places. The company can use sales people, can use catalogs and mail bookings or orders and agents to represent it at different locations all over the country and the world (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). People Freedom Australia should strive to get the right people into their team and the wrong ones out of the team. The second recommendation is that Freedom Australia should then strive to give each player their right position in the team so as to ensure that the people are all effective in their functions (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). Processes Freedom Australia should ensure that the flow of activities and services within the firm are customer friendly. This means that customers should face difficulties when seeking services from the firm. The processes and operations should not present hardships to the customers. They should always have an easy time with the transactions they make with the company so as to encourage them to do more business (Laermer & Simmons, 2007). Physical evidence Freedom Australia should be able to show its customers some of the services that it says it offers. It should explore the option of using videos to capture these services and experiences and post them online so that the customers can have the opportunity to see and believe. Conclusion In conclusion, Freedom Australia is effective in its service delivery because it adheres to the above 7 Ps of marketing to a very large extent. That is why the company has continued to be profitable and attract more customers. Even though there are a few loopholes as discussed in the essay, the recommendations provided can help Freedom Australia to deal with its shortcomings. References Laermer, R. & Simmons, M. (2007). Punk Marketing, New York : Harper Collins. Read More