Overview

This site provides you with a short introduction to the main marketing concepts. It has a special focus on the leisure and tourism industry and to support the theoretical content there are comments from marketing practitioners working for a major tourist resort, an international cruise ship company, a regional airport, and a major tourist attraction. Having reviewed all the online material and completed the exercises you should:

1. Be able to define marketing
2. Understanding the basic management processes undertaken by a marketing department;
3. Be able to undertake a simple environmental review for a marketing organisation;
4. Be able to construct simple marketing objectives;
5. Understand the elements of the marketing mix;
6. Understand the role of research in the development of effective marketing strategies;
7. Understand how markets may be segmented and be able to undertake simple market segmentation;
8. Be able to discuss the basic principles of consumer behaviour;
9. Understand the importance of internal marketing and customer care;
10. Understand the basic principles of branding.
    
    In addition you should:
    
11. Be able to provide a critique of the role of marketing in contemporary society;
12. Be able to compare marketing theory with examples of practice;
13. Have an understanding of a range online resources that can be used to support the work of a marketer
14. Be able to support any discussion about marketing with contemporary examples

The site is divided into 10 sections (including this introduction). At the start of each section there is an overview that suggests exactly what you should know by the end of the section. Each section is designed to be self-contained, but if you have never studied marketing before we strongly suggest that you work through at least the first 5 sections in order.

Each section also contains a short critique of the concepts that have been reviewed and recommendations for further reading. You should consider the critiques carefully. They are there to illustrate the fact that there are seldom entirely right or wrong answers in marketing. For most ideas suggested in marketing, there tends to be counter-arguments. When you consider the critiques you should also consider the evidence in the section and from your own experience as a consumer. You should them decide the degree to which to agree with the critique.

Having reviewed all the material there is a final self-test quiz [link to final quiz] that you can use to test yourself on how much you have taken in. You might want to review that test now [link to final quiz] as well to get an idea about how much you already know.

The sections vary slightly in length but they are all between 2000-3500 words. We have broken them up into smaller sections to make it easier to read from the screen.

With the interactive functions (see below) we anticipate that each section will take approximately 2-3 hours to complete. You should therefore be able to complete all the material on this site within 30 hours.