Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Recently the present government has discussed its dream of making India a 20 Trillion Economy. The focus of the government is on increasing the GDP of the country with focus on all three sectors Manufacturing, Agriculture and Service. Hotel and Tourism industry is a part of Service Sector, which has witnessed a tremendous growth recently not only from domestic customers but also from international customers.
Keywords: Internal Branding, Indian Hotel Industry.
Introduction
India is now witnessing the development of Tier II and Tier cities after the saturation of business in Metropolitan cities, various Hotel brands are now focused in entering these Tier II and Tier III cities. These towns are now finding an increasing competition among service companies as the government is also focused on developing tourism sector. Indore which is a Tier III city has witnessed the same, the competition level is increasing in hotel industry with entrants like Radisson Blue, The Grand Bhagwati (TGB) and more in pipeline like Sheraton. Followed by this, the process of internal branding has become essential within the service brand building process, i.e. aligning the service company's brand promise with employees' behavior. Hence, customer- facing employees within the service organization have become a valuable and competitive asset as they manage to deliver the brand promise.
The aim of this conceptual paper is to derive research questions and research paths in the field of internal branding in hotel industry. Internal branding is poorly applied in tourism management and marketing specially in India. While it is still a general approach, the concept of internal branding describes effects which have been neglected so far and have been interpreted as a more indecent or secondary outcome of brands and branding activities. In this paper the authors present a literature review on recent literature in the field of internal branding and hotel industry to introduce the terminology and the terms "brand and branding" within the context of the hotel industry in India.
Internal Branding
In order to inspire and convince customers, organizations first have to do the same on their employees-to understand and believe in the products/services and brands they represent, to improve performance and ultimately to be more effective advocates with customers. Inspiring employees has clear business benefits.
Internal branding...