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RESEARCH PRODUCT

La segmentazione della domanda e dell’offerta nell’industria dell’ospitalità

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No two customers are identical, even whereas they belong to the same marketing program or they choose the same product or service (Withiam G., 2000). Revenues, costs and therefore profitability differ because of the different effort required to meet the specific need of the specific consumer or group of customers. When competing, firms target information towards specific segments through direct marketing initiatives and actions (Cross R.G., 1997). This finding underlines the importance of knowing in advance customer’s characteristics, even before thinking at the service to provide, and aims to illustrate how the lodging industry normally segments its customers, and which group of customers we may retrieve within the industry. The framework of this article involves four main topics, which cover the theories behind the strategies, the actual configuration of the market segmentation within the lodging industry, the hotel response in terms of product differentiation with a hint on the crucial decision between standardization and customization, and ending with the strategies behind results. The purpose of the finding relies on the statement that two customers are not even similar and in this sense, hotels should invest on studies aimed at understanding the consumer’s behavior (Dall’Ara G., 2009). Choosing the right approach at the right time for the right consumer would stand at increasing the retention, building relationships and customize a one-to-one marketing approach. On an economic point of view, targeting customers would also lead firms to the implementation of the customer profitability analysis, which allow hotels to assign activities and thus costs, revenues and profits (Fasone V., 2007). In this paper, this will be demonstrated not only through the international literature and the hotel newsletters on the topic, but also through a direct study on a four stars’ property, through which the reader will distinguish between the two different approaches, i.e. fitting strategies on customer’s shoes rather than applying the same business strategy.