“The customer is always right” was a saying invented by Gordon Selfridge who thought of business as a way of making customer experience exciting and freeing them from societal norms. This motto was to be implemented by employees of an institution to encourage them to take customer complaints and concerns seriously. The long term goal of this motto was to increase the customer traffic to an institution that made them feel valued. This slogan was particularly used by hospitality establishments to make their guests feel special during their stay at said establishment. This slogan was later a subject of disagreement that eventually inspired research into hospitality by scholars globally. Literacy (reading, writing and research), has now become the cornerstone for hospitality businesses to thrive given the crucial information they provide on customer behavior (client fulfillment and allegiance & service and affiliation marketing). These bits of information, I believe, influences the organizational behavior, business development, strategic management and leadership development: all in the direction of conforming to information on customer behavior. Scholars use literacy (reading, research and writing) primarily for providing and seeking factual information that can be relied upon to, say, influence the organizational structure of an industry and steer it toward better performance financially. Factual information has to be supported by evidence based upon research into said area, written in a specific way to be easily digested by a variety of readers. This research paper aims to identify how literacy of customer behavior helps shape the hospitality industry.
The topic for my discussion is on the subject of effective literacy communication in the hospitality business discipline. The objective of this essay is to provide insight into what are the writing strategies of providing information in hospitality discipline. The need for this research essay was influenced by the significant research done in a fast paced hospitality discipline and the fast and dynamic change in the industry. Most of the research been conducted on customer behavior and businesses in the hospitality industry seem to be changing their businesses strategies to conform to these research findings. The source for this paper will be the interview of Dr. Mi Ran Kim, an Assistant Professor who possesses a PhD in Community Studies and Agriculture at MSU in 2010. Additionally, she pocketed a Master’s degree in Hospitality Business in 2005 at MSU. In the hospitality business, she has qualifications in Hospitality Management and holds a diploma in Administration after studying at Glion Hotel School which is located in Switzerland. She is therefore widely travelled and possesses a wealth of information that was the purpose of the interviews. Her opinion was of importance to this essay given the fact that she is a teacher in the hospitality business with seven-year experience.
Dr. Mi believes that research done in any field is just as important as in any other disciplines. However, she adds that the literacy content is very crucial for the development of industries in said fields; for instance, the hospitality industry where each day, innovative ideas must be introduced to keep up with the trend. According to an article on hospitality, the author explains that the hospitality industry in the USA represents approximately 75% of the GDP and further expresses concern on how research in particular areas in hospitality industry has not been explored and is therefore hurting stakeholders. This goes to show how important literature is in any discipline. She indicates that in the early 20th century, most wealthy people were above age of 40 and therefore interested in conservative practices that was largely propagated by the social classes. However, this shifted along the way as more and more wealth was distributed down the age bracket of 40-75 to 20-35, which therefore presented a case of young prospects whose interests shifted very quickly. She restated that the earlier conceived notion that “the customer was always right” was thrown out the window as it was believed to limit creativity and foster complacency in an industry that was waking up to the shifting interests of their newly acquired clientele. She adds that entrepreneurs in the hospitality industry would, therefore, conduct research before venturing into potential markets which effectively enabled them to change their business strategies: an idea that caught up to scholars and professionals who were drawn to the now booming industry. Scholars would research on the general outlook of the industry and provide crucial information that would loop in the common citizens and professionals would also publish trade journals that essentially assisted the entrepreneurs and potential businessmen who wanted to venture into hospitality arena. In her conclusion, she mentions that literacy in the hospitality discipline played an effective role in dishing out important information that was crucial to the growth of the hospitality industry and it still is today.
Given the fact that she is both a scholar and a professional in this discipline, we also discussed the elusive differences between scholarly articles and trade journals and how those differences translate into the two becoming key pieces on communication in hospitality. Her opinion on the differences and therefore effectiveness – of scholarly articles and trade journals – as a literacy tool were invaluable. There as some similarities and differences when it comes to journal articles and trade journals. Journal articles are primarily written by scholars who may exhibit expertise in the field of research or not. For instance, Dr Mi is a scholar who ventured into a field that she had vast background experience in, and therefore it can be said that her background experience was very instrumental in giving life to the research process and informing the research sources. Students and researchers also venture into said fields of discipline. Trade journals are done by professionals in the particular discipline of area of study, for instance, and again, Dr Mi, who is not only a scholar but also a professional in the hospitality industry given her wealth of background experience and publications on said disciplines. Information from trade publications on Hospitality industry provide quite reliable information (because it is provided by professionals in the discipline) that can be used for research in the hospitality business. Such information obtained from researchers can be used in public libraries for sourcing and as citations by scholars doing research in said fields.
The audiences who subscribe to trade journals are mostly likely professionals in said area who need the information to fulfill their professional duties. As mentioned before, these are professionals in said area of discipline which, therefore, informs my belief as to the reason for their audience consisting of professionals in the same discipline. Take the example of Dr. Mi who has been in the industry of hospitality for a while, the wealth of information that goes into the trade journal, say , General managers’ as well as chief operating officers' assessments of private club panels of directors, that she authored, can influence a similar establishment in said discipline. However, if you look at trade journals, the information available is for consumption and to the benefit of anyone who invests time to study such material. There is no particular professional affiliation in this case
It is also worth noting that trade journals are designed in a way to market the business that the professional is associated with. If, for instance, a professional wanted to do a piece on customer satisfaction, then adding charts based on the customer satisfaction survey by an industry they are affiliated to, is allowed. This is very useful for providing information whilst advertising the product of a particular establishment. Fast forward to scholarly journals and the dynamics change due to faithfulness to said work piece. The objective is to present information without bias or affiliation to any of the establishments in said disciplines. Therefore, any information provided on charts and plotted graphs are devoid of adverts.
Also important is the fact that the graphical materials like charts are specifically aimed – together with advertisements – to said professional audience, as I have mentioned before, who use such information together with that provided on industry news and trends that determine customer relations and customer satisfaction in an industry so vast and constantly changing.
The language used in trade journals is also quite specialized which can easily be understood by the audience that use such information. It is designed this way to enable easy consumption and concise communication on the matter or area of research focused on. A scholarly journal is designed to employ technical terms in a field of study that can be traced by a reader and understood as per the context it is used in the research. This can often be taxing since not everyone possesses the acumen to decipher all the technical jargons in a particular field. It is however, still the most preferred way to communicate information. Since the trade journals have a specific target group that share a lot with the author, it is therefore practical that they use every industry terms that can communicate the idea effectively to the reader.
The informal layout of a trade journal hardly ever employs the use of references. This can easily be traced back to the fact that the author is a professional and the journal provides information based on his/her opinion and therefore it is not necessary to cite phantom works cited: given the fact that the ideas are originally their own. In certain circumstances, a biography of said scholar will be provided: the tradition of providing works cited can be traced back to scholarly articles. It is a show of respect to indicate that an idea is not one’s own originally, hence the need extend the courtesy of citing the author of said material or idea. There are several scholars out there who have ventured into different fields and covered research on different subjects, and according to Dr. Mi, most of these ideas overlap into other fields and what results is wealth of information given the fact that a lot of research is done stemming from motivation to excel a business (es). It is, therefore, much easier to conduct research due to this pool of information, however, she mentions that most research on unexplored areas take time and it is therefore wise for another author using this information to cite which author originally came up with the idea.
Literacy in hospitality is therefore different in a ways to the generalized sort of research that most scholars will delve into in contemporary times. In comparison, the two forms of research may resemble one another in the general approaches (choosing a subject, finding evidence, stating one’s thesis, making an initial outline, organizing one’s notes, writing an initial draft and finally writing the concluding paper), however, the design with which the information is sorted seems to be industry specific unlike in other academic works where the work is information specific (this does not necessarily mean the former is not, it simply means one tends to look at information from a broad perspective that burns down to the single issue addressed by the research topic, as in scholarly work, and the other id defined by the discipline it already exists in and rarely ventures out). Dr. Mi, being both a scholar and a professional has been instrumental in providing helpful information that enabled this discussion to shed light on some of the scope of the different works that clearly show how research in different areas is done, the general similarities and the major differences that there might be in both cases. It is, therefore, a fact that effective literacy stems on scholarly articles for the general and technical information and trade journals for concise information in said discipline.
Works Cited
Dominici, Gandolfo and Rosa Guzzo. "Customer Satisfaction in the Hotel Industry: A Case Study from Sicily." International Journal of Marketing Studies (2010): 1-10.
Huddleston, Patricia. Consumer Behavior: Women and Shopping. New York: Business Expert Press, 2011.
Presbury, R., Fitzgerald, A., & Chapman, R. "Impediments in service quality in luxury hotels." Managing and Service Quality (2005): 357-374.
Randhawa, Praneet, et al. "Hospitality Service Innovations in Private Clubs." Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (2015): 1-18.
Schneider, Carl. The Customer is Always Right (Unless they are Wrong). 04 March 2010. 28 March 2016. <http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4045688.html>.
