Interactive marketing may be a way out for Hotels..!!

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This is an article related to interactive marketing.. I hope you'll like it.

A profession, no less than a craft, is shaped by its tools. The profession of marketing, its theories, its practices, and even the basic sciences that it draws on are determined by the tools at its disposal at any moment. When the tools change, the discipline adjusts, sometimes quite profoundly and usually quite belatedly. The introduction of television advertising 50 years ago was just such a disruptive event, and marketing theory and practice are still responding, evolving their understanding of how the tool works and how its effects should be measured.

The term interactive, as we interpret it, points to two features of communication: the ability to address an individual and the ability to gather and remember the response of that individual. Those two features make possible a third: the ability to address the individual once more in a way that takes into account his or her unique response. Thus we see interactivity as a tool that allows good marketing to become good conversation. The promise of the interactive paradigm, we anticipate, lies in its ability to put a more human face on marketplace exchanges without losing the scale economies of mass marketing.

Interactivity has already made major inroads into marketing budgets in the past decade in the form of direct mail, catalog retailing, telemarketing, and the incorporation of response devices into broadcast advertising. Developments in data storage and transmission, however, hold out the promise of new and better interactive tools to manage relations with customers and to link the networked corporation to its channels and its collaborators. Although the World Wide Web may be the ultimate interactive medium, there is still much that can be done with a pastiche of less exotic interactive technologies. For example, when a broadcast advertisement elicits a response such as a toll-free call—which is then stored in a computer database and which triggers a personalized direct mailing—that sequence represents a form of low-tech interactivity. A sales representative calling on customers is also engaging in low-tech interactivity. The Web, however, promises high-tech interactivity. When a consumer visits a Web site, many cycles of messages can be exchanged in a short time. When the consumer visits some time later, the dialogue can resume just where it left off. The Web medium is as subtle, as flexible, as pertinent, and as persuasive as one-on-one dialogue. It boasts a better memory than the most diligent salesperson and has none of the salesperson’s distaste for repetitive tasks. Although other media may be more gripping, the Web is uniquely responsive.

The world always divides into two groups: those who eat breakfast and those who don’t; those who watch ER every week and those who don’t; and now, those who think that interactive media will change our lives forever and those who don’t.

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