Services Marketing-Individual Assignment Solution

Bridlington Lobster Capital of Europe (BLCE) – Sea Food/Lobster Festival

Context

Measured by landings and value Bridlington is the leading lobster port in Europe. An ambitious plan has been created to use this reputation as means to develop a tourism industry that is distinct from other seaside location in the UK. Bridlington already has many of the ingredients to support this branding and development activity. These include miles of beaches, an historic harbour, a wide and diverse range of accommodation types including hotels, guest houses Airbnb, and caravan parks, the Spa, Sewarby Hall, park and ride and a recently built leisure centre all set in an attractive coastal location.

Importantly Bridlington is in a war with all other seaside locations to attract tourists and to ensure that they spend money in and around the town. This is where “Make Bridlington the Lobster Capital of Europe” initiative comes in. This goes beyond a simple branding and marketing communications activity and requires that a much deeper understanding of different tourist is gained specifically in relation to customer experience, customer journey, customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Bridlington seeks to increase the use of its built and land assets and as such it is keen to identify events and activities that can result in greater customer footfall (existing and new), leading to increased discretionary spend. A key element of this is the creation of a Lobster/Seafood festival.

Task

The focus of the assignment is the re-launch of the “Lobster/Sea-food festival” which will take place sometime in 2021. You are to design the festival and need to think through some of the following issues in coming up with your ideas:

• What the nature of event should be (type, duration, facilities and activities….)

• When should the festival run?

• What would be attractive in the marketplace (competitor offerings, best practice, value proposition, price point)

• Which customer segments to target and how

• How they could use events to create customer experience congruent within the mission (Bridlington Lobster Capital of Europe) and brand (customer journey)

• Risk of undertaking the activity and how these can be mitigated.

• How immersive such a festival should be e.g. overnight camping/glamping, tasks, activities, instruction……..

• What type of things would work for a 12/24/36 hours of activity?

• Could it be tied into other tourist assets that exist?

• Are their learnings from organizations which have tried and succeeded or failed in similar activities?

• What specific customer experience factors need to be considered both positives and negatives?

• Some indication of how to “launch” such an event.

• Costs, budget, profit?

We require that you produce a business report that:

1. Outlines the festival event

2. Explains what “customer journey”, “customer experience” and “customer mapping” mean in the context of the festival.

3. Produce a blueprint/process map to identify weak/potential fail points.

4. Identify and make recommendations of how performance can be improved, use industry best practice from other food based festivals to guide you in developing your ideas. Think about this in terms of touch points at pre-experience, consumption and post experience.

5. Consider and provide evidence as to how the strategies you identify can support the experience of the customer to develop positive WOM and underpin relationship management opportunities.

This is an Individual assignment:

Requirements

Key Specifications and Requirements:

1. All contact with “sea food festival” organizing committee must be via the module leader.

2. Assignment is to be produced as a professional report.

3. Assignment length – 3500* (not including cover page, executive summary, contents, data charts, references and appendices). Mark penalties will be applied in accordance with HUBS guidelines.

4. You are expected to produce 10 PowerPoint slides in the format of a “sales pitch” based on the ideas you create. This will be submitted as an appendix to the main report and should not exceed 500 words (part of the 3500 words).

5. You must acknowledge any factual sources of information and include references to ideas, assertion or concepts used in your discussion. Failure to adequately referencing resources is treated as plagiarism under regulation of The Business School, University of Hull.

6. You must use Harvard Referencing System to state any factual sources of information in the text and the list in a bibliography. You can find further details of how to do this in the Business School Study Skills Handbook.

7. It may help to have someone read through your assignment in draft form, to detect any grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, typing errors or confusion in your use of language. Careless work rarely achieves top marks and good presentation can help a strong argument to be understood more easily.

8. Content Requirement, students must demonstrate:

•Knowledge of the subject area in question.

•The ability to search out additional (relevant) material to that given in the lecture.

•The ability to marshal material into logical and coherent lines of reasoning in critical and analytical fashion.

•The ability to inform the reader whilst answering the question.

•The ability to acknowledge the contribution of others with accurate and appropriate referencing (use Harvard Referencing System) – when relevant to use.