Category: Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Financial & Competitive Advantages of an Effective Hotel SEM Strategy

By: Leora Halpern Lanz & Jovanna Fazzini Inefficient algorithms drove various search engines throughout the 1990’s. Search results were at times unrelated to the proposed query, and were cluttered with spam. Google soon devised a more organized and systematic search result listing, and the relevance of search results improved exponentially. The plethora of data distributed […]

Delivering Food to the Front Door: A New, Or Very Old, Convenience?

By: Christopher Muller, Ph.D. A century of commercial competitive conflict between the grocery (food at home or “FAH”) and restaurant (food away from home or “FAFH”) distribution channels is now being fought on an unexpected but previously contested battlefield: who will own the “convenience” of delivery in the consumer’s mind. Just one hundred years ago […]

The Prevalence of Longevity Among Leading Brands

By Bradford Hudson, Ph.D. The age of firms and the implications of organizational longevity have been recurrent topics of interest among business scholars. However, attempts to catalogue or quantify the age or number of older firms are relatively rare. Even fewer scholars have investigated the longevity of brands, as opposed to the longevity of organizations […]

A Conversation with Howard Schultz CEO of Starbucks

By Christopher Muller A conversation between Mr. Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, and Dr. Christopher Muller during the September 2011 12th annual European Food Service Summit in Zurich, Switzerland (edited 2014). [Muller]: So we get to just have a conversation. Can we talk about Starbucks and social responsibility, the leadership of how you drive not […]

The Fall and Rise of the Travel Agent

By Stephen Jermanok In 1990, I left my job as a broker in Manhat­tan, booked an open-ended ticket to the South Pacific, New Zealand, and Australia, and wrote my first travel story, “Dining with the Descendants of Cannibals on a Fijian Is­land” for the Miami Herald. It would prove to be the start of a […]

Hospitality Management: Perspectives from Industry Advisor

By Rachel Roginsky and Matthew Arrants In prior quarterly reports, Pinnacle Advisory Group presented timely updates about the New England lodging industry, which included focused profiles on particular cities. In this issue, the firm offers more general insight about the hospitality industry. Several Pinnacle executives recently participated in a panel discussion about investment, management, and […]

An Important Arrival: The Anatomy of a Vintage Advertisement

By Bradford Hudson The advertisement for American Airlines that is reproduced on the following pages appeared in national magazines in late 1957. It is a two-page centerfold color spread depicting a couple arriving at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, after a flight on American Airlines. The discussion below provides a deconstruction and analysis of its […]

Building Hotel Revenues through Tourism

By John Murtha When evaluating ways to maximize revenues, hotel executives should consider supporting the efforts of local destination marketing organizations (DMOs). Helping to build and sustain travel to a city or region can benefit individual hotels, by combining resources and energy on marketing tactics that would otherwise be too ambitious or costly for a […]