PhD proposal presentation by Maduka Udunawara
ECU's School of Marketing, Tourism and Leisure invites you to attend a PhD proposal presentation by Maduka Udunawara:
Impact of Novelty Seeking Behaviour on Customer Relationship Management (CRM): With Special Reference to the Hotel Industry
Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for services organisations to achieve repeat visitation, positive Word of Mouth (WOM), reduced marketing costs, opportunity to cross sell, better customer insights and customer loyalty. Moreover, CRM has been widely used in the hotel industry highlighting its capability to deliver economic benefits by customer retention.
Similarly, the literature reveals the importance of novelty seeking as a key travel motive. This character leads to the question of a possible preference to experience various hotels instead of visiting the same. Novelty seeking will impose implications on CRM efforts for loyalty. However, despite the potential importance of novelty seeking behaviour to the hotel sector, much of the novelty seeking literature so far has been discussed at the destination level rather than in a hotel context.
Based on these premises the overarching question of this study is "how novelty seeking behaviour of leisure tourists influences the effectiveness of CRM activities in relation to achieving loyalty". This study will investigate the role of CRM in an industry potentially influenced by novelty seeking behaviour. Further, it is intended to make a contribution to the overall understanding of CRM and how it needs to be adopted in the hotel industry.
For this purpose a sample of leisure tourists will be selected from Australia. Data will be collected triangulating qualitative and quantitative methods. Focus group interviews will be conducted with leisure tourists and interviews with the hotel managers in the first phase of data collection. Incorporating the themes and information derived from this exploratory stage a questionnaire will be prepared to conduct an online survey at the second phase. For the purpose of qualitative and quantitative data analysis NVivo, AMOS and SPSS softwares will be used respectively.
Supervisors: Professor Hugh Wilkins, Dr Dale Sanders and Dr Stephen Fanning
Date: Friday 16 March, 2012
Time: 3:00 pm
Location: ECU, Jooondalup campus, building 8, room 302. Campus maps
For more information contact Bev Lurie, or phone (08) 6304 5237.