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Destination Management
Destination Management
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Management:
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July 23rd, 2013.
Destination Management
The fundamental destination marketing principles need to be at heart of every marketing organization or city. They are also critical components of brand management strategy as well as ingredients for decisive action. These principles entail:
Being customer-centric: This can be achieved through ensuring that the destination experiences are offered in a manner that delight customers and marketing messages strongly resonate with customers.
Constant Innovation: Destination marketing requires that organizations or cities act fast and introduce new creative methods, partnerships, products and messages of conveying relevant content to this changing industry.
Offering outstanding value: Business should focus of things which are really valuable to customers and visitors.
Targeting and understanding the destination market: Understanding the needs of particular segments and wider market trends is critical. This entails the development of meticulous products and services targeting the inherent features of a destination (Faulkner, 2007).
According to Faulkner (2007), the various levels of objectives and goals of destination marketing planning systems comprise:
A vision is the framework for the strategic planning of an organization. Its statement can apply the whole organization and just one unit of the organization, while a mission is a short description of the fundamental purpose of the organization. Mission answers the questions why the organization exists (Gayle & Goodrich, 2008).
The PRICE model components interpret the long-term and short-term volatility economics as a pricing factor. It relates these two components to quantify the tightness of business cycle and financial constraints.
The stages of destination marketing system entail
Source: (Gayle & Goodrich, 2008).
The Contents of a destination marketing plan are:
Overview of the business
Market Overview
Industry Information
Market Information
Customer Information
Service or Product Information
Objectives
Business Strategy
8PS
Operational plan
Action Plan
Budget
According to Faulkner (2007) the 8 Ps of destination marketing comprises:
Promotion: This involves promoting services and products to create public awareness and enable to visitors and customers to consume the services and products.
People: Customers usually share their destination experiences with family and friends, regardless of whether bad or good. Therefore, customer service is critical component of destination marketing.
Product: Within tourism industry, the product is the same as a service since some attributes of the product provide experience as opposed to tangible commodities. Therefore, products such as cultural, accommodation, food or transportation experiences should offer great experiences and customer satisfaction.
Partnership: Partnering with organizations which share same business aspirations, enhance across selling of services and in the end benefit both the partner companies, through enabling them to meet the marketing costs of the business.
Planning: Having a marketing plan enables an organization to establish customer expectations and develop a process of attaining those expectations.
Place: To market a tourism service or product, a company needs to ensure that the place is easily accessible to allow customers purchase or consume the service.
Packing: This is how the tourism product is presented to the customer.
Price: This is monetary value which a customer pays for a product or service. The price should factor in market share, competition, survival, profit maximization and positioning.
KRAs help assess the DMOs marketing performance through focusing on the results as opposed to activities, develop value-added decisions, set objectives and goals, and prioritize individual activities. KPIs help organizations measure and define progress toward attainting its fundamental success factors or objectives. KPIs are quantifiable parameters which are expressible in non-financial and financial aspects and reflect the organization’s nature. They help determine decline in expenses, increase unit sales, product quality among others (Gayle & Goodrich, 2008).
References
Faulkner, B., (2007), A model for the evaluation of national tourism destination marketing programs, Journal of Travel Research, Vol.35(3), pp.23-32
Gayle, D., and Goodrich, J., (2008), Tourism marketing and management in the Caribbean,
Routledge
Despite their differences in time, loci, as well as historical circumstances, the unfolding events in the Iraqi and the Vietn
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Introduction
Despite their differences in time, loci, as well as historical circumstances, the unfolding events in the Iraqi and the Vietnam Wars are characterized by many similarities. At the outset, the origin of the two wars have been attributed to the US foreign policies that are seen as dictatorial and colonialist as the superpower seek to expand its influence in foreign cultures as well as sustain domestic political support in a prolonged war against irregular enemies (Record, & Terrill, 2004, 1) The Vietnam offensive in 1968 was viewed negatively by the American citizens having caused about fifty seven thousand American lives. It was seen as a military failure on the side of President Lyndon Johnson who had to forfeit his re-election bid due to the negative public opinion against the war. Likewise, the Iraqi war has been characterized by similar events and the increasing deaths of American soldiers. The war tarnished the image of Republicans under the Bush administration enemies (Record, & Terrill, 2004, 2). On the other hand, the two aforementioned offensives in Vietnam and Iraq have differences too. The differences are manifested in the military as well as strategic perspectives of the two wars. For instance, the differences are witnessed in a variety of circumstances including the scale of the military operations, the strategic environment within which the wars occurred, the magnitude of losses incurred, the role of enemy allies, the quality of enemy resistance as well as the duration of warfare (Record, & Terrill, 2004, 2).
The US foreign policies have been questioned by many people across the world given its unwarranted and indecisive actions against sovereign states. The invasion of Iraq for instance raised eyebrows among opponents who compared the war to that of Vietnam claiming that the US had indulged in an affair where withdrawal may prove challenging to achieve. The US embarked on an invasion of Iraq citing its interest in creating a politically stable and democratic country. Such an initiative has prompted comparison with the Vietnam offensive of 1968. The opponents of the Iraqi war argue that US had made a wrong decision by invading Iraq on the basis of uncovering the weapons of mass destruction which the country was accused of harboring (Record, & Terrill, 2004, 2). However, the objectives of the Iraq war were not realized as the claimed weapons could not be found. Instead, the escalation of violence in the communist State is on the rise day by day as witnessed in the Vietnam War which was characterized by similar scenes. Apart from the deaths of foreigners as well as citizens, the US military and its allies continue to 6record fatalities in Iraq due to the escalating violence caused by the war in the country (Record, & Terrill, 2004, 2).
Both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war were orchestrated by constant deceit and misrepresentation the US administrations preached to the world. The Johnson administration delivered the same positive message concerning the offensive against Vietnam which later proved to be a lie. The US government under Johnson claimed that the fall of Vietnam would result into the takeover of Asia by communist (Hess, 2009, 75). On the other hand, Bush administration used the same strategy to invade Iraq and the world realized the claims raised by the administration against Iraq were also false. Bush claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in addition to having a link with the dreaded Al Qaeda. He further asserted that the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein would ensure peace between Palestine and Israel in addition to enhancing democracy all over the Middle East region (Hess, 2009, 75). The credibility of both Johnson and Bush administrations were dented leading to political losses as the former president forfeited his re-election bid and the republicans losing polls in what was seen as the negative public perception of the republicans. In both the scenes, US administration was seen as lacking elaborate plans to execute such military actions against the foreign state or insurgents as claimed (Hess, 2009, 75).
Furthermore, the strategy and tactics applied by US government in both the wars are similar. The war in Iraq for instance has proven challenging to the US troops in a myriad of ways (Dumbrell, & Ryan, 2007, 212). To begin with, the US troops are indulging in a guerrilla war and the insurgents know it better than they do given the rugged terrain in the country. The insurgents always engage the US troops in timely and systematic attacks and always avoid concentrating in areas where the US may launch their attacks (Dumbrell, & Ryan, 2007, 212). Moreover, the insurgents have always adopted the urban warfare by staying in close proximity to the US troops and attacking the troops after which they take cover by using the civilians as human shield. Consequently, the US troops are finding it difficult to attack the insurgents without killing many Iraqi civilians. Just as witnessed in Vietnam offensive of 1968, the enemy has proven intelligent to deal with. He does not conform to the US rules and play his own version of the war game instead. Finally, the enemy is willing to die on the ground of his belief which he can not forfeit (Dumbrell, & Ryan, 2007, 212).
Besides, the US government is finding a bit difficult to balance between winning hearts and minds using aid and post-war reconstruction and using force to eliminate insurgents in the alien territories. Just like in the Vietnam War, American government resorted to post-war reconstruction including the building of schools as well as hosting games such as soccer in Iraq (Hess, 2009, 75). On the other hand, the US government believed in the use of firepower as witnessed in both counts. In Vietnam for instance, the superpower dropped bombs in Indochina that could be compared to the number of bombs dropped in the rest of the world up to the time of Vietnam offensive. Finally, the failure by the US government to provide accurate record counts of the number of civilian casualties in wars has been utilized in both the wars in Vietnam and Iraq (Record, & Terrill, 2004, 2). The US military has always misreported the casualties during the wars in Iraq due to the heightened number of civilian deaths. Such deaths are always reported as insurgents and not civilians. This was also evident in Vietnam where the civilians were reported as insurgents. It is therefore noteworthy that the lives of those deliberated from war as claimed by the US government are not as important as those of the deliberator (Record, & Terrill, 2004, 2).
On the other hand, proponents of the Iraqi war detest such comparison of the two wars claiming their sharp differences. At the outset, they argue that the country of Iraq is a moderately young state overwhelmed by heightened religious and ethnic divisions that threaten national unity compared to Vietnam that had been well established in the sixties (Dumbrell, & Ryan, 2007, 212). It had a powerful national identity as well as a long national history created by a long period of violent resistance to foreign rule. Moreover, the US went into Vietnam War with a highly-skilled and experienced enemy who enjoyed international support as well as legitimacy considered to the war in Iraq where the US allies easily overwhelmed the weaker military which has been politically isolated.
Additionally, whereas the war in Iraq moved steadily fast from conventional conflict to insurgency, the nature of Vietnam War moved in the opposite direction from insurgency to a conventional war. Moreover, the insurgents in Iraq were engaged in smaller-scale attacks against the US and its allies without elaborate objectives (Dumbrell, & Ryan, 2007, 212). The small and scattered groups indulged in such attacks as car bombs, assassination and ambushes against the US and its allies compared to the Vietnam communists who had well planned and executed attacks against the foreign forces resulting to a conventional victory. Besides, they had an elaborate economic, political as well as social objective of the insurgency. Finally, the war in Vietnam was limited in military operation as the US was only seeking to defend South Vietnam without intending to overthrow the North. Its military action in Indochina was also supervised by the Chinese whose intervention would have been a threat to the US. In contrast, the US enjoys military freedom in Iraq due to its superiority (Dumbrell, & Ryan, 2007, 212).
Conclusion
The US foreign policies have so far raised eyebrows among many states globally. Its attempts to colonize sovereign states in a bid to expand its political and military superiority have been met by opposition from all sectors worldwide. The two wars in Vietnam and Iraq demonstrates the superpower’s dictatorial nature as the real causes of such invasion are not established. The two wars have so far displayed a lot of similarities including the lame excuses US government provided as the cause of such invasion, the strategy and tactics used in both the cases, the heightened escalation of violence during such wars, the poor plans adopted by the US and its allies, the similar tactics used by the enemies in both cases as well as the misreporting by the US military concerning the civilian casualties in both the wars. However, some differences in the wars have also been established. These may include the differences in nature of the wars, the nature of the enemy as explained above as well as the differences in the historical and political background of Vietnam and Iraq which had great impact on the offensives (Dumbrell, & Ryan, 2007, 212).
Work cited:
Dumbrell, John. & Ryan, David. Vietnam in Iraq: tactics, lessons, legacies and ghosts. London:
Taylor & Francis. 2007. Print.
Hess, Gary. Presidential decisions for war: Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq. 2nd
Edition. Maryland: JHU Press. 2009. Print.
Record, Jeffrey. & Terrill, Andrew. Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities, and Insights.
Philadelphia: DIANE Publishing. 2004. Print.
Despite the immense steps made in technological development, many people take it for granted and never take time to think abo
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Technology
Prompt 5
Introduction
Despite the immense steps made in technological development, many people take it for granted and never take time to think about it. While many people find technology as something useful, remarkably few ponder about it and instead, it fades to the background of their worlds. This may be attributed to the fact that while large strides have been made technologically, remarkably little is known about it. In fact, many people know quite much about individual technologies but have extraordinarily little general understanding about technology. In fact, technology remains one of the most comprehensively known aspects of human experience, but of its deep nature, remarkably little is known (Arthur 68).
While there may be quite varied explanations for this, W. Brian Arthur opines that this has been due to the interaction between science and technology. He states that technology has for a long time been standing in the shadow of science, its more prestigious sister. In this case, it is honored less and studied even less. In addition, technology is believed to be the main cause of disharmony in the planet and, therefore, individuals feel that it is intellectually distasteful and perhaps unworthy of deep study. Arthur is of the opinion that many people feel that simply because they created it, they already know and understand it (Arthur 67).
Arthur believes that technology has been mostly examined by philosophers and social scientists, who have understandably viewed it as a separate object from the outside. While this view may work sufficiently well for individuals who want to understand the incorporation of technologies in the economy, it would not answer the fundamental questions. This makes it even harder to understand the relationship between science and technology, how they originate and consequently evolve (Arthur 57).
Arthur acknowledges the fact that science plays a significant role in discovering modern phenomena; that is, the hidden clusters of effects from which technologies are formed. It offers the means for observing the effects, the theories that predict the behavior of technologies, the comprehension needed to operate them as well as the methods to capture technologies for use. He states that science is involved in discovery while technology deals with the application. However, Arthur believes that technology is not simply the application of science but rather the only way to which technologists can understand the operation of the deeper layers.
In addition, Arthur is of the view that technologists do not simply obtain scientific ideas and apply them. Instead, they use the ideas without awareness as to the details pertaining to their origin. This is because the ideas that have their origin in science are digested into varied technology bodies over time. The ideas interact in the varied fields with exceptional application and experience to develop other theories, as well as practice. In this case, technology does not simply apply science but rather builds from its experience and science. This implies that science is woven in technology and vise versa. In essence, science gains insights by probing nature using methods and instruments through technology. This means that without instruments for comprehending and observing phenomena, modern science would be unheard of. Science builds its comprehension from the instruments.
According to Arthur, science incorporates the use of technology in the form of experiments and instruments in order to have a clear understanding about some questions. In doing this, technology draws from scientific explanations, theories and reasoning about the how the world operates. While these explanations may not be a replica of technology, it is noteworthy that they are constructions that point at a purpose. This purpose is to clarify the operation of an observed world feature, while their components are essentially conceptual elements that blend in line with accepted rules. In this case, theories or explanations adopted in science are not technology but rather purposed systems (Arthur 66).
All this means that, on top of using technology, science is built on technology. It is founded on conceptual constructions, experiments, methods and instruments it uses, which is not surprising since it is essentially a method for comprehension, explanation and probing. At the center of science are many sub-methods (of probing, explaining and comprehending), in which case if it was to be stripped to the core structure, it would be a form of technology.
However, Arthur acknowledges that science cannot be equated to technology. It is essentially a set of moral ideas, which hold the view that, nature can be probed, known, causes singled out and understandings gained if a phenomenon is explored and its implications investigated in highly controlled ways. It refers to a set of understandings that are accumulated from thought and observation of the past. In essence, being a set of practices, beliefs, friendships, exchanged ideas, convictions and competition; it undoubtedly would not be reduced to typical technology. In fact, it is extremely possible to have science without technology. This would be science that is based on conjecture and thought alone. While this may be contradicting the earlier insinuation that science cannot exist without technology, it may also be viewed as strengthening the notion that such science would be exceedingly weak (Arthur 77).
This, therefore, underlines the fact that technology has its foundation on the harnessing of phenomena that is largely not covered by science. In the same sense, science has it foundation on technology or rather it is formed from the technologies in the use of experiments, methods and instruments that it develops. This indicates that there exists a symbiotic relationship between science and technology, with each participating in the continued creation of the other. They are interdependent and inseparable. Arthur, therefore, is of the opinion that technology is required in advancing science while science would be required so as to understand and uncover the deeply buried phenomena (Arthur 46). Strengthening the union between technology and science is the fact that technology would be inexistent without phenomena. This, however, does not imply that technologies are direct proceeds of phenomena. Nevertheless, known phenomena and collectives of technology are always in tandem. However, phenomena can exist without technology since their form and existence cannot be controlled. All that can be done is using what can be used. Arthur also opines that a phenomenon determines the kind of technology that comes into play. This means that if the universe had different phenomena, the technology would also have been different.
Conclusion
Technology has been a crucial part of the modern inventions. In fact, many people would never imagine a world without the varied objects of the invention. However, many people have come to identify technology as part and parcel of science. It is vital to acknowledge that the relationship between science and technology is of mutual complement. Science uses technology in the form of experiments and experiments so as to gain clarity on some questions. Technology on its part uses science in giving more clarity in understanding phenomena. Note that there would be no technology without phenomena. Technology is always founded in some natural phenomenon or truism that may be exploited and utilized to a specific purpose. In essence, technology that does not exploit anything achieves nothing. For example, a lowly hammer is based on the phenomenon of momentum transmission. Oil refinery is founded on the phenomenon of varied components of vaporized crude oil would condense at varied temperatures.
Works Cited
W. Brian Arthur, “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolve”. New York: Free Press, 2009. Print