Message
New service management outlook
“Relationship-focused” marketing management saves the with / post corona era
The hotel and restaurant industry is facing great challenges in the COVID pandemic. However, it is important to consider this difficulty as a valuable opportunity to leap into a truly strong industry and conduct an appropriate analysis of the current situation. It can be said that the strategy that will be effective in the future is to shift from "market expansion principle" to "market deepening", that is, to emphasize relationships with customers.
So what exactly should we do?
Intuitively speaking, the customers who use your hotel or restaurant should be somebody (people who recognize each other), not anybody (unspecified number of people who cannot see their faces). In order to become a company that survives in an environment where the market is mature and there are many competitors, it is necessary to make full use of the management resources that the company has in order to fulfill the wishes of its customers. By doing so, you will be "chosen" by your customers.
Avoiding contact with people to prevent infection requires measures such as reducing the number of seats in restaurants and the number of guest rooms sold in hotels, which means a decrease in profits per square meter of facilities.
In order to achieve sustainable growth of a company under this circumstance, it is necessary to increase the amount of consumption. Revenue = number of customers x unit price, so if the number of customers cannot be expected, there is no choice but to raise the unit price. It's simple. However, the problem is the act of raising only the amount of money without changing the content or quality of the service. Such behavior will not only be questioned by business ethics, but will also make it impossible to acquire, retain and nurture customers.
And, unfortunately, the act of making and selling what a company wants to sell is becoming obsolete, even if it is a product or service that can explain why it is expensive.
Therefore, an effective strategy is to cherish the customers who have long-term relationships throughout their lives and accumulate the total amount of consumption. Actually, this is not new, and there is something that leads to Japan's unique business path that we Japanese have inherited. I feel that I can overcome this difficulty by analyzing it scientifically and putting it into practice.
Tetsuo Kuboyama
Founder & CEO
The PGH Enterprise Co., Ltd.