where marketing lives on ideas and ispiration: 2007

Saturday, 10 November 2007

Payment on delivery - Recognising constituency service as political marketing

The Authors

Patrick Butler, School of Business Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, and
Neil Collins, Department of Government, National University of Ireland (Cork), Cork, Ireland

Abstract

The notion that political marketing occurs only during formal campaign periods is discarded in the political marketing literature. Political campaigns, rather than being periodic, are “permanent”. Accordingly, the attention of political marketers must increasingly turn to the analysis of how and when politicians serve their communities or constituencies. Indeed, the kinds of services commonly associated with political influence and constituency activity indicate a convergence of politics and public sector service provision. In this essay, the nature and effects of constituency-focused service delivery are examined as an integral part of political marketing.

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Article Type: General review
Keyword(s): Politics; Services marketing.

European Journal of Marketing
Volume 35 Number 9/10 2001 pp. 1026-1037
Copyright © MCB UP Ltd ISSN 0309-0566

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Political marketing and the permanent campaign

The political arena usually is highly charged with beliefs and emotions, as well as conflict and partisanship, that rarely characterize the consumer’s choice of commercial products (Kotler and Kotler, 1999, p. 4).
Elections and the campaigns that precede them are atypical periods in the political life of a country. The unusual air of excitement, tension and expectancy produces a certain myopia among politicians, activists and journalists. In the context of political marketing, the beguilement of the election campaign, together with its supposed role in informing the electorate’s views, have led to disproportionate attention being paid to it by political scientists and others. As Scammell asserts:

Researchers from predominantly political science backgrounds generally locate marketing within “campaign studies” (Scammell, 1999, p. 719).
The notion that political marketing occurs only, or even mainly, during formal campaign periods is now firmly discarded in the political marketing literature as too limited an understanding of politicians and marketers alike. Even those who write extensively about campaigns admit that, in particular circumstances, “... it is difficult to believe that [the campaign for the 1997 UK general election] made much difference to the outcome” (Kavanagh, 1998, p. 143).

Political campaigns, rather than being periodic, are “permanent”. Since Blumenthal (1980) popularised the term, the “permanent campaign” has been increasingly observable in the major Western political marketplaces. One illustration of this kind of permanence is that statesmen, when governing, are still relentlessly campaigning. Prime Minister Blair in the UK, ever since his election success in 1997, is reported as presenting speeches that contain the same material and arguments as his campaign addresses. Similarly, President Clinton, when well into his final term in the USA, was perceived to have travelled the country promoting essentially local issues elevated to national prominence – to be running the government on “tiny ideas” (Nimmo, 1999). Contemporary leaders, then, may be said to be governing to campaign, rather than vice versa. While Nimmo (1999) carefully addresses the realities of age-old democratic political life, in which officeholders turn “... office itself into a full-time campaign platform” (p. 75), the greater permanence of political consultants in relation to politicians themselves is a noticeable contemporary phenomenon.

Political parties are obviously busy between elections; a political marketing model should provide a useful theoretical perspective on this activity. At a popular level, the fuller picture is obscured by the attention given in the media to national issues, policy statements, attacks on opponents, and sound bites from the legislature. However, to view the campaign period as the major element in a marketing model of political party activity is equivalent to focusing only on the high profile market activities of mainstream commerce, such as mass advertising campaigns, new product launches or major public relations exercises. That perspective neglects the critical analytical, planning and monitoring roles that both precede and accompany them, such as market research and test marketing, market segmentation and profiling, brand positioning, pricing, channel development and the like. The objective here is to show that political marketing extends beyond the obvious campaign period; in particular, the continuous constituency-focused efforts of politicians and parties is presented as fundamental to understanding the reality of marketing practice in this context.

Change in political systems

In the context of the permanent campaign, the emphasis of politics has shifted from the abstract or principled to the tangible or immediate. Citizens as customers are evaluating more closely the measurable outputs of political systems. This is reflected in the volatility of voter behaviour, the “end” of ideology, and an increasing consensus on economic liberalism. Increased volatility does not necessarily lead to major shifts in the party system (Mair, 1997), though in both the 1970s and the 1990s a number of countries, e.g. Canada in 1993 and Austria in 1994, saw significant shifts in the support for particular parties. What is clear, however, is that many parties face a decline in party identification and membership. In Europe, for instance, Plasser et al. (1999) report that the erosion of voter loyalty and the decline of political organisation strength has led to the professionalisation of political parties, and consequently to the strategies and explicit practices of political marketing.

There has been a decrease in the importance of ideology in mobilising mass support. In pre-1980s politics, for instance, British political parties could mobilise support by appealing to class issues. In the classic summary of voting behaviour in Britain, Pulzer remarked that: “Class is the basis of British party politics: all else is embellishment and detail” (Pulzer, 1967, p. 98). In Italy, Christian Democrats would raise the spectre of communism to garner support. Similarly, Communist parties in Europe mobilised support around issues of ownership of resources. In recent times there has been a marked and widespread reduction in the potency of ideological rhetoric and conflict; today, ideological politics differ in emphasis and tone.

Finally, there is a broad consensus on public ownership, social security, secularisation, etc. in Western polities. In the USA, it would be difficult for an outsider to differentiate between Republicans and Democrats. Even as political party membership is declining and as voter turnout is falling, the fight now is largely for the centre. Perhaps the critical political problem, then, is mobilising – getting the voters out. For example, Appleton maintains that in France there are:

... two mutually reinforcing trends. The first (and most obvious) is the decline of the ability of the “established” parties of the Fifth Republic to mobilise the (potential) electorate (Appleton, 1995, p. 52).
Appleton’s second trend is the increase in the number and diversity of small parties. This being the case, it becomes necessary for politicians and parties to recognise new kinds of demands, and to address them in innovative ways. Ironically, as politics becomes more global, issues become more local. Hence, citizens, as consumers, are concerned less with earlier political heroes and symbols of identity, and more with community infrastructure such as medical and housing provisions. Therefore, the appeals of politicians must change in terms of their ideological tone, the channels of communication and interaction, and the mechanisms for serving their communities. In this situation, the concept of service delivery – so central to marketing theorists and practitioners – is key. That is, parties as well as individual politicians, seek to show they are better at managing such service delivery.

Constituency service as marketing

Given the features highlighted above, the attention of political marketers must increasingly turn to the analysis of how and when politicians serve their communities or constituencies. The kinds of services commonly associated with political influence and constituency activity naturally draw together questions of politics and public sector services. Of course, as will be addressed further below, such questions are contingent on the nature of the political system. Nonetheless, that time between formal election campaign periods is when such service delivery is the principal focus. Indeed, it could be argued that the daily concerns of constituents are hardly attended to during the campaign, as candidates concentrate on traditional electoral strategies.

A simple marketing analogy might suggest that this time between formal election campaigns is dedicated to analysis and planning, wherein past successes and failures are addressed and reviewed; current affairs are considered; and forthcoming issues are forecast. However, that negates the actual “hands on” marketing activity and implementation that is at the heart of this argument. It is naive to assume, as campaign-centred models tend to, that there is no active marketing on the ground, or that the permanent campaign is simply “spinning”. So, the more obvious ongoing marketing outputs and activities are positioning and repositioning on policy; development and amendment of personality profiles in response to, or in anticipation of, new socio-cultural issues and preferences; ongoing research in the form of polling and focus group interviews and so on. But, here, the claim is that the real marketing activity is the ongoing interactions between politicians and their electorate in the form of service delivery.

In the light of such observable political reality, a new model should recognise that public services are directed at electorally sensitive sectors, key constituencies and potential supporters. Important theoretical advances can arise out of this observation: that is, the convergence of the disciplines of political marketing and public sector marketing. Elsewhere (see Butler and Collins, 1995; Collins and Butler, 1999), the priorities of public sector reform and service delivery are stressed, and the politician’s role in those functions are addressed. Here, the matter is primarily understood from the perspective of political marketing: that is, the role of the politician in public service delivery attains a new emphasis in political marketing.

Politicians and public service delivery

It becomes clear that theoretical understandings of political marketing need to recognise the patterns of politicians’ actual work. In the vast majority of cases, even in parliamentary and local government systems, most political representatives are either members of non-governing parties or backbenchers or both. This fact is largely ignored in the literature on political marketing, which tends to emphasise either formal campaign periods and related activities, or policy-level aspects and implications. The tasks of speaking in the legislative chamber or its committees, researching policy options and other law-making activities occupy only a proportion of a politician’s time. For many, the ratio is very low compared to constituency service. The importance of this part of the politician’s job is attested to not only by the time but also by the resources given to it. Many analysts resist such observations because:

At the core of our political culture is the expectation that parliament and popular democracy should play a leading role in legislation and policy-making. However ... the opportunities for popular representatives and their institutions to play their “proper roles” are very limited, if not becoming largely infeasible ... One of the main reasons that parliamentary systems are increasingly marginalized in modern politics and governance is that Western societies have become largely differentiated and far too complex for a parliament or its government to monitor, acquire sufficient knowledge and competence, and to deliberate on (Andersen and Burns, 1996, p. 227).
Hence, the attention paid to both formal campaigning and national, policy-level political activities does not reflect the inherent marketing behaviour of the majority of politicians. Constituency-oriented activities are becoming recognised as central. In the USA, for example:

Casework and other forms of constituency service and attentiveness have been recognised as vital elements of legislative life in parliaments around the world, the US Congress, and state legislatures. Constituency service is a major form of responsiveness and representation (Johannes, 1983, p. 531).
Janda et al.’s (1999) analysis concurs:

Much of the work performed by the large staffs of members of Congress is casework – such services for constituents as tracking down a social security check or directing the owner of a small business to the appropriate federal agency. Constituents who are helped in this way usually remember who assisted them (Janda et al., 1999, p. 101).
Even in jurisdictions such as those of Britain, where constituency service was once considered of marginal electoral significance, politicians now devote increasing efforts in their constituencies. The received wisdom was that the “personal vote” in Britain was worth no more than five hundred votes. In contrast, in the USA, an incumbent is dependent on constituency service to stay in office. The weight of research indicates that Britain is now coming closer to the American pattern in that constituency service is becoming more important (Norris, 2001). British MPs must look to their “surgeries” and other direct contacts with their constituents to cushion themselves from electoral swings (Cain et al., 1987). In the Scandinavian countries parliamentarians may be allowed to be indifferent to constituency needs. The electoral system and cultural patterns there insulate individual politicians from constituency service unless prodded by the party élite. It is no coincidence that the origin of the ombudsmen is found in Scandinavia. Similarly, there is some evidence that Australian legislators may have less pressure than others to service their constituencies:

Contrary to findings in other polities, dealing with constituents’ grievances reduces a legislator’s vote, mainly because such activity displaces other, more electorally advantageous, party-focused activities (Studlar and McAllister, 1996, p. 69).
This counterintuitive finding may reflect the predominance of “safe seats” in the Australian system. Ireland, however, is probably typical of small liberal parliamentary democracies:

Judging by the large amount of time spent on constituency affairs, it seems in practice to be more important in the working life of a TD (an Irish parliamentary deputy) than narrowly defined parliamentary duties such as speaking in the Dáil [parliament] chamber or examining legislation. In most countries, it is taken for granted that parliamentarians will work assiduously to protect and further the interests of their constituents; constituency work forms part of an MP’s parliamentary duties rather than existing in counterposition to them (Gallagher and Komito, 1992, p. 206).

Blurring of politics and public service

The blurring of governmental and party-political behaviour evidenced in the level of importance that politicians place on service delivery is an important focus for analysis of political marketing realities. On the subject of governing, or policy development, just as the prevailing models of political marketing ascribe too much significance to electoral “events”, they also exaggerate politicians’ role as legislators:

According to the democratic concept of representation, sovereignty lies with parliament, which alone has the right to vote on the law ... all the decision-making and practical activities of bodies...are inferior or subordinate to parliament, starting with the government itself ... Since the Second World War this fine edifice of juridico-political theory has lost some of its lustre ... the existence of disciplined party majorities has made parliaments appear as rubber stamps that offer legitimacy to “elective dictatorships” (Meny and Knapp, 1998, p. 186).
The Wilsonian dichotomy that perceives the separation of policy and administration is a dated analytical perspective. While general issues of allocation are assigned to politicians, and specific entitlements to bureaucrats, the notion that they are disconnected is unrealistic. Politicians are concerned with the implementation of policies on the ground, and public servants, while non-partisan, are rarely politically neutral. Particularly at the local level, public sector service delivery is a joint endeavour:

Local partisan activities of legislators and their electoral coalitions systematically influence field office activities of federal bureaucracies in their electoral districts. This alternative to centralised democratic controls over bureaucracy occurs because discretionary policy decisions made at the field office level are influenced by local resources generated through partisan activities (Scholz et al., 1991, p. 829).
But as Scholz et al. (1991) go on to observe:

... [T]he Weberian image of a rational, centrally controlled bureaucracy continues to dominate political analyses of federal bureaucracy even though it has been replaced in organisational theory by a recognition of the more open structure and broader range of environmental influences affecting most complex organisations ... To cope with the complexity of the environment in which organisations like federal agencies operate ... with multiple specialised functions (budgeting, personnel, rule-making functions, legal services) interacting primarily with their counterparts in other organisations in the central environment (Washington) and a number of field offices where the “production work” takes place, all interacting with local clientele, local elected representatives, and local officials from other government agencies ... [F]ield offices of federal bureaucracies respond to local electoral politics in a way that reinforces democratic controls (Scholz et al., 1991, p. 831).
So, recognising the converging roles of politicians and bureaucrats alike in policy networks and in delivering services, it is incumbent on theorists to include their combined design and implementation efforts in a political marketing model. Such convergence is typical in the management field; in the strategic management literature, separation of planning and implementing is considered unrealistic (see Ansoff, 1991, 1994; Mintzberg, 1990, 1991, 1994). The “design” school, with Igor Ansoff as its icon, perceives strategy as a logical process in which rational analysis guides strategy formulation, which is then communicated and implemented down through the organisation; it is strongly normative. The “process” school, identified with Henry Mintzberg, argues that strategy formulation and implementation are not dichotomous. This view identifies “intended” strategy as that conceived by top management; “realised” strategy as a small proportion of the intention; and “emergent” strategy, as the primary determinant, consisting of those decision patterns that emerge from the adaptation of individual managers to strategy interpretations and external circumstances. Mintzberg’s (1987) ideas on “crafting” strategy emphasise iteration, experience, intimacy, and harmony. For the delivery of public services, and the actual role and functioning of politicians in this, the extent of hands-on experience of politicians in implementing policy on the ground may be argued to be directly related to their effectiveness in developing and framing policy.

Public service delivery mechanisms

As convergent and emergent perspectives are recognised in public service design and delivery, and as the role of politicians is accepted in both development and implementation of policy, the broad range of services and their delivery mechanisms become relevant. Public sector service delivery will differ according to the scale and scope of the service being provided. An understanding of the distinctive characteristics of public sector services is relevant to marketing:

The public sector market is hugely diverse in terms of population, structure, demand and activity. Among the characteristics of particular interest to marketing are: the status of the customer as a citizen; the peculiar competitive forces and players; and the distinctive nature of demand (Butler and Collins, 1995, p. 89).
The actual delivery mechanisms of public services involve both general provisions and specific allocations over a wide range of products. Innovation and change in the design and development of channels for delivery have increased many of the complexities involved, thereby furthering the role of the politician as intermediary. Increasingly, delivery is organised using:

... a mix of governmental relationships, new “partnerships” between the public and private sectors, market mechanisms and “marketized” public policy and new roles for ... the voluntary sector and the “community”. In place of the relatively ordered pattern of relationship which existed ten or more years ago – like a cake of relatively well-defined sections – industrial societies have become all jumbled up, and resemble not so much a Battenburg as a marble cake (Parsons, 1997, p. 492).
This, then, draws us towards the need for a more realistic understanding of the politician’s role in delivering services to the constituency. Despite attempts at public sector reform and the improving of public service provision and allocation, a distinctive feature of this marketplace is the high-profile role played by politicians as customer advocates. On the one hand, the increasing interest in streamlining public services, the improvements in access to public bodies and services, the quality statements and customer service promises of government departments in so many Western countries should improve overall service delivery. This is an extension of the kind of managerialism promoted by the influential Osborne and Gaebler (1992) study in the USA, in which they enjoined governments at all levels to reconstruct themselves around the needs of the customer. There is an associated suggestion that such a process will squeeze out interfering politicians and render pork barrel, credit-seeking, gesture politics unnecessary and even distasteful. This is the view of the streamline strategists, who might favour system and process over behavioural analyses, and there is obvious merit in it. On the other hand, however, there is a clear danger in ignoring the inherent advantages to all of having a close involvement in the implementation of public services by politicians. It may be perceived, and usefully leveraged, as a form of market research and testing, with beneficial outcomes both on the ground and at policy redesign stages.

In Ireland, for instance, various studies have described politicians as specialists helping the “bureaucratically illiterate”. Politicians regularly bring complaints to departments on behalf of their constituents, and it is the social welfare, housing and medical entitlements problems that dominate their caseloads. These “customer” complaints may not be heard if not facilitated by politicians. It is important to note that the evidence from case studies offers a picture of brokerage that is low key and routine. Major allocative decisions are not involved. Rather, the politician is like a

... lawyer, who operates not by bribing the judge, but by ensuring that the case is presented better than the citizen would be able to present it (Gallagher and Komito, 1992, p. 140).

Managing at the margin

For all the attention paid to marketing in the political and public service domains – a differentiation that may be somewhat exaggerated – its impact in the short and medium terms is relatively limited. In the main, the stability of the broad mass of public service delivery defies radical adjustment by politicians, even in government, in the short, electorally crucial, time period. They are managing, for the largest part, at the margins. The major determinant of public policy as expressed in public expenditure include demographics, global economic trends and other environmental factors which are not amenable to short-term political adjustment. Most politicians feel the pressure of the local impacts of these forces when schools have to be built or hospital wards closed. The vehicle for the pressure is competing claims of constituents or their lobbyists for help or amelioration from the impact of economic change. As US House Speaker Tipp O’Neill expressed it, “all politics is local”. The type of electoral systems and the administrative frameworks within which they work insulate politicians in some countries from some of these complexities. In others, electoral imperatives, cultural expectations and the scope of state activity ensure a close attention to service delivery. It is likely, however, that a consequence of decreasing ideological competition will be an increase in the importance of constituency service delivery.

The debate about the influence of politics on policy is a long and acrimonious one (Paldam, 1989; Cheung, 1997). For the position advanced here, it is not necessary to suggest that all government policy or even most of it is the product solely of underlying socio-economic determinants. The different paths travelled by Western democracies in response to the changing economic challenges since the late 1970s demonstrate more right-wing responses in the UK and the USA than in other countries. Similarly, it is important to note that, even within tightly constrained policy environments, marginal changes can be very significant politically. As with companies, some policy sectors are more amenable to changes in strategic direction than others. What is being highlighted, however, is that policy parameters are narrower than the rhetoric of politics suggests; a focus on campaigns can obscure this reality and much political marketing is about maximising the local significance of relatively stable public policies.

Conclusion: recognising constituency service as political marketing

Political marketing shares much in common with marketing in the business world. In business marketing, sellers dispatch goods, services, and communications (e.g. advertising) to the market, and in return, money (consumer purchases), information (consumer research), and customer loyalty are received. In [political] campaigns, candidates dispatch promises, favors, policy preferences, and personalities to a set of voters in exchange for their votes, voluntary efforts, or contributions (Kotler and Kotler, 1999, p. 6).
Kotler and Kotler spell out the central analogy of political marketing. Nevertheless, they still draw back from the implications of their observation that “sellers dispatch goods [and] services”. However, they do acknowledge the importance of “favours”. This article seeks to place services in terms of services to the individuals, communities and key constituencies at the centre of the political marketing effort.

In the developing political marketing literature, the campaign remains the focus of political marketing observers, and constitutes the bulk of such analysis and commentary. There are good reasons for this, given that campaigns demand enormous resources and attention to planning, are a time of concentrated activity in the political marketplace, and are the subject of intense analysis post the event. It is clear that for politicians in government office, the permanent campaign is a reality that permeates every day and every decision. The short time frame of their tenure, the importance of opinion polls and the financial requirements of campaigning demand as much. But most politicians elected to office, even the majority of those in the governing party, are not involved in high office and policy development. As backbenchers, they must somehow maintain a kind of permanent campaign also. This process is largely manifested in their constituency work and their association among the electorate with the delivery of benefits and services to their constituency – either in personal or broad community terms. Because governing party politicians have the ears of colleagues appointed to ministerial office, they have some advantage in influencing decisions in favour of their own constituencies, and may be inclined to take credit for what occurs in the interests of their electoral base. Where the politician is on the opposition backbenches, the potential for marketing differs again. Clearly, the opportunities are more at the service implementation and delivery end of the continuum rather than at the policy design and development end. Hence, basic, functional constituency work, especially where the “safe seat” does not exist, is the reality for the majority of politicians. This is the nature of their marketing; their permanent campaign.

We show here that the role and status of the formal campaign is over-emphasised in the political marketing debate, at the expense of a more inclusive perspective. In agreement with initiatives by the likes of Lock and Harris (1996), O’Cass (1996), Newman (1999) and Baines et al. (1999), it is necessary to cast wider and mine deeper to capture those other critical factors that influence and determine political marketing outcomes. Frankly, it may be said that the attention paid to formal campaigns in the development of a sound theoretical basis in the discipline is unhelpful, because it is not a fair reflection of marketing as it is actually practised.

The ideology-based mobilisation of the electorate in the past led to limited attention being paid to policy delivery analysis. With the trend away from such politics, it becomes clear that new analytical forms and new criteria are required to evaluate competition, achievement and potential in the political marketplace. In this regard, the permanent campaign is not simply about communicating messages, spinning and glossing over stories: it is now seen to be critically concerned with ongoing service delivery. Whereas this concept may have conventionally been perceived in terms of policy initiatives and administrative improvements, the developing argument here is that the service delivery of interest and benefit to politicians and their electorate is the continuous, low-level, repetitive work that a critical mass of constituents actually value.

The nature and effects of service delivery at these levels is neglected in the literature for several reasons, not least of which is that, realistically, it is difficult to research. In research terms, contact with senior party officials, and the ready availability of policy papers, media files and electoral data make for more concentrated and accessible forms of investigation. However, if marketing is to be understood and explained in the political arena, the reality of politicians’ working lives must be uncovered in these terms. Landmark research on the US Congress has argued that members of Congress are overwhelmingly motivated in their behaviours by their desire to be re-elected (Herrnson, 1999). Consistent with this analysis, the rational choice literature teaches us that people engage in behaviours that they perceive to be rational efforts towards reaching their goals. In the case of the US Congress, the literature shows that members of Congress dedicate a great deal of their time to the time-consuming projects of constituency service and pork-barrel representation. They do so because they see this as a way to improve their chances of achieving their goal of winning re-election. Indeed, the existing literature suggests that little else but the desire to be re-elected motivates members of Congress to spend their time on constituency service.

Campaigns and elections are central elements of liberal democracy. They are the means by which voters choose between competing political offers. Increasingly, the campaigning ethos is reflected in the way government itself is conducted. The literature attests to the continual use of the techniques of campaigns. The process of governing is, however, also part of the effort of securing votes, as is the attention to their own constituencies of all politicians. The impacts of these aspects of politics are difficult to research and to assess. Nevertheless, they are very much an aspect of political marketing, and deserve greater attention in building theoretical models.

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Studlar, D.T., McAllister, I. (1996), "Constituency activity and representational roles among Australian legislators", Journal of Politics, Vol. 58 No.1, pp.69-90.
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Payment on delivery - Recognising constituency service as political marketing

An examination of the role of marketing culture in service quality

The Authors

Sherriff T.K. Luk, Associate Professor, Department of Business Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dr Nick Johns for his candid comments and constructive suggestions and Ms. Wendy Ting for her assistance in collecting and analysing the data.

Abstract

Competition in Hong Kong’s tourism market is very intense and local travel agencies have to improve the quality of their service in order to enhance their competitive edge. This industry-specific research examines the relationship between marketing culture and the perceived service quality of outbound tours. The author sampled tour escorts and asked them to describe the patterns and characteristics of their firms’ marketing culture. Tour members who had just returned from outbound tours were also sampled for the measurement of their perceptions of the quality of tours. The findings indicate a positive relationship between marketing culture and service quality. High quality service can be delivered when a travel agency successfully fosters a customer-oriented marketing culture characterized with a strong emphasis on service quality orientation and interpersonal relationships. In a high-contact service business such as tourism service, marketers must understand that commitment to quality service and service mentality are integral elements in the firm’s culture and that a positive attitude towards interpersonal relationships must be held by service employees.

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Article Type: Research paper
Keyword(s): Hong Kong; Marketing environment; Service quality; Tourism; Travel agents.

International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
Volume 9 Number 1 1997 pp. 13-20
Copyright © MCB UP Ltd ISSN 0959-6119

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Background

Travel agency services in Hong Kong can be divided into three broad categories: outbound package tours; inbound package tours; and general ticketing. In 1995, approximately 3 million Hong Kong residents joined outbound tours to overseas destinations, representing a 100 per cent growth in the last ten years. Currently more than 100 agencies offer outbound packages from Hong Kong, with three agencies dominating the market and accounting for 55 per cent of the total market share. With so many travel agencies competing in a small, saturated market, local travel agencies have to improve the quality of their service in order to enhance their competitive edge. By providing high quality services, travel agencies hope to differentiate themselves from competitors and to entice first-time and repeat visitors. In this regard, delivering superior service quality appears to be a prerequisite for success in the 1990s tourism market.

Despite the lack of empirical research into the relationship between marketing culture and service quality, Swartz et al.’s[1] review of recent developments in services marketing has highlighted the possible effects of marketing culture on service quality as an emerging area for future research. The present study aims to:

provide an overall measure of marketing culture in travel agency industry;
measure the service quality of outbound package tours as perceived by tour members;
examine the relationship between marketing culture and perceived service quality and its implications for managing service quality in the tourism industry.

The role of tour escorts in service delivery

Inseparability of service production and consumption is a striking service characteristic which implies that employees and clients must interact with each other in the service delivery process. These interactions bring both parties physically and psychologically close and have an overtly strong influence on the service delivery process. The quality of a service is thus assumed to be a function of employee-customer interactions[2], where variations in customer contact personnel’s performance lead to differences in service quality. “Service delivery variations that reflect individual skills, talents, or other qualities of contact personnel provide a way to differentiate a firm’s services and to create a competitive advantage”[3, p. 169]. In this sense, contact personnel can be an important base for successful market differentiation.

The strategic importance of service personnel can be further elaborated in their boundary spanning roles. By performing boundary spanning functions, they can channel back information about the dynamics of the competitive environment and feedback on customers’ perceptions of the service and the firm. Their interactions with customers also provide opportunities to communicate the firm’s image.

Following this line of thinking, it is not difficult to understand why the tour escort is one of the most essential components of an outbound tour package. Frontline personnel accompanying a tour can be considered the delivery mechanism for tour service. Functions include monitoring the tour schedule, encouraging and motivating tour members to participate in group activities, alerting tour members to safety and security issues, and responding to unpredictable situations. Without a good escort, the service will be inferior. Thus travel agencies should first have employees who are approachable, flexible, and dedicated to quality service. This is perhaps the most desirable objective of cultivating a marketing culture.

Marketing culture for service firms

Corporate culture is a set of unwritten decrees, rituals, and a pattern of shared values and norms which permeate an organization[4]. It is a “glue” which binds functional units more closely within the organization[5], provides the central theme underlying the growth of a firm[6] and defines the way that business is conducted[7]. More importantly, cultural values exert tremendous influence on the behaviour of employees and the productivity of the organization[8, 9, 10]. Schneider[11] even argues that strong cultural values are particularly important for guiding employee behaviour in service organizations. In addition, corporate culture could affect a firm’s ability and approach, including both technical and administrative procedures, to coping with the external environment[12] and quality management activities.

The idea of generic service characteristics which impact on the formulation and implementation of service marketing plans raises special issues about the type of marketing culture appropriate for services marketing. Here, marketing culture refers to what is “unwritten, formally decreed and what actually takes place in a marketing context”[13;p. 113]. It can help employees to understand the marketing function better and, by responding to customer requests from a marketing perspective, may ultimately allow them to adjust their behaviour so as to meet customers’ specific needs more confidently and effectively.

Keiser[14] has suggested that disseminating a marketing mentality throughout an organization is a key strategy for enhancing service quality. Albrecht[15] uses the term “service culture” for marketing culture and reiterates the contribution of marketing culture to service firms as providing the only effective means to win employees’ commitment to serving customers. In addition, a distinct marketing culture can teach service employees how to respond to new, unforeseen and even awkward situations created by unpredictable requests from customers[16].

The best approach to improving the quality of service interactions is to develop service-minded employees who firmly believe that they “should do everything possible to keep the customer satisfied”[17, p. 16] so that delivering high quality service to customers becomes a natural way of life[18]. Such a belief is one of the manifestations of marketing culture.

The positive linkage between marketing culture and successful marketing of services suggests that cultivating and sustaining a service culture is the new challenge to service marketers[19]. It urges service marketers to implant service culture among service employees. However, marketing culture is the result of careful planning and involves a series of ongoing training activities. When designing such training programmes, the prerequisite is a good understanding of the components of marketing culture.

The concept of marketing culture is nebulous and has yet to be defined precisely. Pioneers have tended to use “marketing culture”, “service climate” and “service culture” interchangeably[10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 20], but some of them failed to provide an operational definition of the construct. Only a few were able to identify the essential components of a service-oriented culture[12, 13, 17]. For instance, Webster[12, 13] provides an operational definition of marketing culture in terms of six dimensions: service quality, interpersonal relationship, interpersonal communications, innovativeness, organization and selling task. This operational definition allows the measurement of a firm’s marketing culture, to discover its nature, and to identify linkages with service performance.

Research methodology

A two-pronged research methodology was employed which allowed the researcher to collect information on participant firms’ marketing cultures and data concerning tour members’ perceptions of the quality of outbound tours. This permitted an investigation of the relationship between marketing culture and service quality.

Employee survey

Selection of participants. Over 100 travel agencies provide outbound tours to local customers in Hong Kong, but the majority employ no more than 20 employees and the scale of operation is very small. Preliminary interviews with business executives and public relations managers from four small-scale travel agencies randomly selected from a local telephone directory showed that these firms retained few tour escorts or even relied on part-time staff to provide outbound tour service. They seldom offered corporate culture-building programmes to their employees. It is doubtful whether their service employees were able to identify their firms’ culture. In order to ensure the reliability and validity of the measurement, the survey therefore only targeted medium- to large-scale travel agencies employing teams of full-time escorts. Initially, about 15 agencies agreed to participate but only three remained interested after the preliminary interviews with senior managers (either marketing managers or human resource managers). Two of the participants were among the top-ten travel agencies in terms of sales revenue and played a significant role in Hong Kong’s outbound tour market.

Senior managers from the participating agencies were approached first to collect qualitative information about their attitudes towards marketing culture-building programmes. During the preliminary interviews, these executives explicitly indicated that their firms had introduced orientation and training programmes to cultivate a distinctive marketing culture. For instance, in order to improve the service quality of package tours, two travel agencies (TAA and TAB) used post-consumption questionnaires to measure customers’ perception regularly, whereas the third travel agency (TAC) also conducted similar surveys occasionally. The findings were used as major inputs for culture development programmes. TAB also conducted telephone surveys to measure customers’ satisfaction with its tours and launched a “politeness campaign” to reinforce employees’ awareness of the importance of courtesy to its customers.

Measurement of marketing culture. A structured questionnaire was used to measure the perceptions of tour escorts working in the outbound tour division of the sampled travel agencies in terms of their firms’ marketing culture. Respondents were asked to indicate the perceived importance their travel agencies placed on each of the cultural components by scoring on a 7-point scale. The overall aggregate mean represents the index of strength or weakness of each travel agency’s marketing culture. The instrument used was initially designed by Webster[13] and consists of a number of items aimed at essential components of the service firm’s marketing culture. It was first developed in 1990 in a cross-sectional study involving four service industries and was refined in 1993 in terms of both content and convergent validity. Webster advocates that the refined instrument should be “a fairly universal scale whose items and properties would be applicable to a wide range of services”[13, p. 115].

Consumer survey

The major objective of this survey was to understand consumer perceptions of the outbound tours. To ensure that the respondents would have fresh recall about their service experiences, only those who had just returned from a tour within two weeks were included.

Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to the sampled tour members when they participated in a “photo-exchange tea party” organized by the travel agencies. A structured questionnaire was designed to measure the perceived service quality of outbound tours. As SERVQUAL[21, 22, 23] has been recommended as the generic measurement tool for service quality, the measures incorporated into the questionnaire were mainly developed from the original SERVQUAL instrument. Modifications were made so as better to capture customers’ expectations and perceptions of tourism service. It followed the lead of Knutson et al.[23] and Luk et.al.[24] who have shown that modifying the SERVQUAL scale to accommodate characteristics of hotel and tourism services improves the validity and reliability of the index for service quality in hotels and packaged tours.

Findings and discussions

Employees’ perception on marketing culture

A total of 68 tour escorts from the three agencies completed the questionnaires, representing more than 70 per cent of the tour escorts working in all sampled travel agencies. For some unknown reasons five respondents did not answer part of the marketing culture questions, so only 63 completed questionnaires were used for data analysis, with 27 from TAA, 24 from TAB, and 12 from TAC. The results are shown in Table I.

Overall, TAC has a stronger marketing culture than its two competitors. In terms of individual dimensions, all travel agencies placed a greater emphasis on “service quality” but a moderate emphasis on “organization”. In addition, all three travel agencies in the study displayed similar but fairly low aggregate means on the dimensions of “internal communication” and “innovation”. Thus it would appear that they gave a low priority to fostering these aspects of their marketing culture.

Significant variations were detected in the perceived importance of the remaining two marketing culture dimensions. TAC appeared to recognize the importance of “interpersonal relationships” in service delivery and, as perceived by its service employees, had actually invested to cultivate this type of marketing culture within the firm. In contrast, “interpersonal relationships” were perceived as the least important cultural element by service employees from TAA. “Selling task” was considered as the third most important marketing culture dimension by all firms; but both TAB and TAC seemed to place more emphasis on it than TAA.

Customers’ perception over the outbound package tour

A total of 92 questionnaires completed by the sampled tour members were used for statistical analysis and the distribution was as follows: 28 from TAA, 37 from TAB, and 27 from TAC.

A principal-components analysis with varimax rotation was conducted to obtain the dimensions of service quality. The Kaiser test for eigenvalues greater than unity suggests a five-factor solution which explains 68.4 per cent of the variance. A factor loading of 0.4 was used as a cut-off point to eliminate variables with low correlation from each factor and a reliability test was applied to examine the internal consistency of each factor separately. The results show that the value of the Cronbach coefficient alpha of the first four factors ranged from 0.83 to 0.93, indicating that there is good internal consistency among items within each of the four service quality dimensions. However, factor five has a low coefficient alpha of 0.55 and comprises only two variables (see Table II).

Factor one can be interpreted as the tangibles dimension which is composed of service facilities, hotel accommodation, good meals, information brochures and leaflets describing the services available during the tour and places of visits, as well as helpful, polite and friendly tour escorts. Factor two can be defined as a responsiveness dimension, variables with high loading on it include the ability of tour escorts to deliver the service promptly, providing the service at the time as promised by the tour escort, willing to respond to tour members’ requests, willingness to explain clearly the service benefits and features to tour members, and being willing to respond to tour members’ requests even when busy. The variables loading highly on factor three include experience and competence of the tour escort, ability to communicate, ability to organize and control all activities to meet the schedule, and ability to foster a friendly, harmonious relationship among tour members. All these quality attributes seem to suggest that factor three represents the assurance dimension of service quality. Factor four can be defined as a reliability factor which is composed of the following quality attributes: the ability of tour escort to instil confidence in the tour members’ choice of joining the tour, no sudden increase in tour cost, and a friendly tour characterized by good relationships among tour members. The structure of factor five is comparatively simple and it represents the service quality dimension of empathy which refers to personal attention to individual tour members and tour escort’s ability to understand the specific needs of each tour member.

A summary of aggregate means of individual factors for each travel agency is presented in Table III. Apparently, TAC outperformed both TAA and TAB in all quality measures. It was perceived by tour members as being excellent in providing reliable outbound tour service, organizing and controlling tour activities, fostering friendship among tour members, responding promptly to tour members’ requests, and delivering the services through high quality performance. The service performance of TAB was perceived as above average but relatively weak in responding to tour members’ requests whereas the performance of TAA is weak in all service quality dimensions.

The relationship between marketing culture and perceived service quality

Table IV shows that, for the sample studied, the stronger the overall marketing culture, the higher the overall service quality perceived by tour members. Such a positive relationship confirms that perceived service quality is a function of marketing culture.

The marketing culture of a service firm may be considered as being composed of six dimensions including service quality, interpersonal relationships, the selling task, organization, internal communications, and innovativeness. Assessing which dimension has the most influence on the overall service quality would in principle generate valuable strategic insights for service quality management. Aggregate means of each marketing culture dimension in Table I show similarities and differences in the marketing cultures of the participant travel agencies. Cultures are very similar in terms of “organization”, “internal communication” and “innovation” and one can hardly discriminate between the participant agencies on the basis of these dimensions. However, significant differences in the aggregate means of both “service quality” and “interpersonal relationship” dimensions suggest that these types of cultural value are powerful determinants of service performance and that service quality orientation is the most important component of marketing culture in the travel agency industry (Figures 1, 2 and 3 present this information in graphical form).

Conclusions

Findings of the present study indicate that high quality service can be delivered only when a travel agency successfully fosters a customer-oriented marketing culture characterized by emphasis on service quality orientation and interpersonal relationship. According to Webster’s marketing culture scale[12], this “service quality” dimension is composed of eight values:

succinct definition of excellent service;
commitment to quality service of top management;
regular measurement and monitoring of employees’ performance;
focus on customer needs;
strong linkage between employees’ behaviour and the firm’s image;
desire to meeting the firm’s expectations on quality service;
on communication skills; and,
attention to detail in their work.

These values create a bias towards customers within the firm, bring employees as close to customers as possible, and lead to behaviour that is deliberately performed to meet the desirable quality standards.

The “interpersonal relationship” dimension includes attention to employees’ feelings, recognition of employees as invaluable assets to the firm, adoption of an “open-door policy” within the organization, frequent interactions between management and front-line employees, and encouragement to express opinions to higher management. All these values create a favourable internal environment that facilitates the passage of information on quality matters within the firm. They also nurture close work relations between subordinates and supervisors which may be mirrored in employees’ relationships with their customers[20, p. 2]. Where subordinates find themselves being treated well by their supervisors, they may also try hard to treat their customers well.

The importance of these two marketing culture dimensions is linked to the inseparability of service production and consumption. This generic service characteristic implies that employee-customer communication is indispensable to the whole service delivery process. At some point during the interaction process, tour members may turn to tour escorts for information crucial to defining the types of co-operative behaviour that they are required to perform, such as completing the travelling documents required by the customs and meeting the group at the specific time. In reverse, tour participants may also make specific demands of the tour escort, expecting personal attention. This kind of participation behaviour is common in high-contact services such as outbound tours, but only those employees who have a service mentality will genuinely and constantly respect customers, serve them courteously and flexibly, spend unwavering efforts to solve their problems, and try hard to recover the situation if something goes wrong. At TAC, which places greater emphasis on the “service quality” dimension, tour escorts were fully aware of the impact of their behaviour on the quality of tour service and on customer satisfaction. Because service quality was a day-to-day concern within TAC, the tour escorts understood the meaning of service quality and what was expected of them in terms of the quality standards defined by the top management. In addition, the emphasis on “interpersonal relationship” led to effective interdepartmental and interpersonal communication, facilitating quick responses to unpredictable requests from tour members. This type of service mentality and behaviour explains why TAC seemed to perform better than its competitors when delivering outbound tour service.

The results of this research should enable travel marketers to design internal marketing programmes aimed at cultivating a strong, service-minded marketing culture. Travel marketers and training managers should incorporate marketing culture, the components of the service quality and interpersonal dimensions into service training programmes. Emphasis on service quality components will infuse service employees with a firm belief that the total existence of the firm depends on the customer and with a new way of thinking about quality orientation. This kind of belief and orientation will facilitate a caring attitude for customers. Training programmes with a strong theme in interpersonal relationships will enable service employees to appreciate better the importance of interactions, to understand their contribution to the organization, and to feel a warm, open, and supportive atmosphere within the organization.

For a long time, marketing culture has been thought to influence service quality but this conjecture does not appear to have been empirically tested. In this respect the findings reported here provide some new insights. Further, given marketing culture’s importance to the quality of tourism service, researchers interested in hospitality marketing might investigate whether the impact of individual culture dimension on service quality changes over time, and what types of culture building programme are more appropriate.

The research described here had several limitations. Measuring the culture of an organization at the level of individual organizations meant that the sample size was too small to permit statistical analysis of the relationship between marketing culture (and its various dimensions) and perceived service quality. A follow-up study with a larger sample size should overcome this problem. The two-pronged research method could also be applied to other service industries in order to enhance the generalizability of the conclusions.

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Table I Summary of the aggregate means of the overall marketing culture and individual marketing culture dimension
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Table II Factor analysis on perceived service quality of outbound tour
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Table IV Comparison of the aggregate means of the overall marketing culture
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Table III Aggregate means of individual service quality dimension
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Figure 1 Relationship between “overall marketing culture” and overall quality of outbound tour service perceived by tour members
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Figure 2 Relationship between “interpersonal relationship” and overall quality of outbound tour service perceived by tour members
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Figure 3 Relationship between “service quality” as a culture dimension and overall quality of outbound tour service perceived by tour members

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Payment on delivery - Recognising constituency service as political marketing

Payment on delivery - Recognising constituency service as political marketing

An examination of the role of marketing culture in service quality

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