The Ritz Carlton - Service Quality
Company case 13: The Ritz
The Ritz Carlton features luxury hotels and five-star resorts worldwide: from America to the Middle East, and from Europe to Asia. With an unshakeable credo and a corporate philosophy of an unwavering commitment to service, the hotel has won countless rewards and has been recognized with numerous awards for being the gold standard of hospitality.
QUESTION 1: Most people see a Ritz Carlton hotel as a swanky building on a prime site, such as London’s Picadilly, but is the structure the essence of the hotel chain’s success?
Whereas a product marketer works with tangible products: things that can be tasted, heard and seen in advance – a service marketer does not. As is clear of the manual (Kotler P, Principles of Marketing) the intangibility of services makes it difficult for buyers to evaluate the service before consumption, therefore uncertainty is increased. To reduce uncertainty, buyers look for ‘signals’ of service quality: they draw conclusions about quality from the place, people, price, equipment and communications that they can see. Therefore, the service provider’s task is to make the service tangible in one or more ways to send the right signals about quality. This is also called evidence management, in which the service organisation presents its customers with organised, honest evidence of benefits of its offers.
A hotel at the luxury end, such as the the Ritz Carlton, must make this positioning strategy tangible in every aspect of consumer contact through a number of marketing tools. Rather than leaving that evidence to chance, it has to carefully manage a set of visual and experiential clues. First, the place or the hotel’s physical setting should give an appropriate sense of style, grandeur or opulence: its exterior and interior must look beautiful, chic and be designed to look more than just a place to sleep. But this in itself is not enough, and is not the essence. Second, and essential, is the staff working at the
The Ritz Carlton features luxury hotels and five-star resorts worldwide: from America to the Middle East, and from Europe to Asia. With an unshakeable credo and a corporate philosophy of an unwavering commitment to service, the hotel has won countless rewards and has been recognized with numerous awards for being the gold standard of hospitality.
QUESTION 1: Most people see a Ritz Carlton hotel as a swanky building on a prime site, such as London’s Picadilly, but is the structure the essence of the hotel chain’s success?
Whereas a product marketer works with tangible products: things that can be tasted, heard and seen in advance – a service marketer does not. As is clear of the manual (Kotler P, Principles of Marketing) the intangibility of services makes it difficult for buyers to evaluate the service before consumption, therefore uncertainty is increased. To reduce uncertainty, buyers look for ‘signals’ of service quality: they draw conclusions about quality from the place, people, price, equipment and communications that they can see. Therefore, the service provider’s task is to make the service tangible in one or more ways to send the right signals about quality. This is also called evidence management, in which the service organisation presents its customers with organised, honest evidence of benefits of its offers.
A hotel at the luxury end, such as the the Ritz Carlton, must make this positioning strategy tangible in every aspect of consumer contact through a number of marketing tools. Rather than leaving that evidence to chance, it has to carefully manage a set of visual and experiential clues. First, the place or the hotel’s physical setting should give an appropriate sense of style, grandeur or opulence: its exterior and interior must look beautiful, chic and be designed to look more than just a place to sleep. But this in itself is not enough, and is not the essence. Second, and essential, is the staff working at the