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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