Entrepreneurial Hospitality Businesses: Application to a New Consumer Purpose Model

Abstract

This paper applies a proposed concept of underlying consumer purpose and psychological bonding to the entrepreneurial hospitality industry, including hotels, restaurants, and bed and breakfast establishments. Since the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the industry has seen a huge surge in pent-up demand. Event planners’ expectations have risen. Students are flocking to the industry where there is almost a guaranteed employment upon graduation. The hospitality industry, being one of the largest industries worldwide, faces intense market competition. To succeed, it relies on various factors, including customer satisfaction, loyalty, trust, affective commitment, and share of wallet The model applied in the paper has recently been published in the Journal of Asia-Pacific Management. The model synthesizes multiple theories, that includes need fulfilment theory, goal theory, and congruency theory. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate that a comprehensive understanding of consumers' needs, goals, values, and self-image is crucial for marketers to enhance service experiences, achieve sustainable success, and help consumers attain their desired psychological outcomes. To combat this somewhat sceptical view of service mix development benefitting the hotel firm primarily, we propose the need to broaden hotel marketing and innovation strategies to include recognition of purposeful fulfilment of consumers' psychological needs/tasks, goals, values, and self-concept. Doing so will strengthen the organizational commitment to hotel consumers, leading to sustainable success for the hotel firm and other hospitality-related businesses. To exemplify further the usefulness of consumers' underlying purpose, we have supplied a variety of hotel examples in figures that demonstrate how hotels can create innovative products or services by utilizing a single meaningful purpose to communicate distinct competencies in meeting consumers' psychological needs and goals and asserting values congruence and self-image congruity. These easy-to-understand models can be applied to the hospitality industry. The paper includes examples and illustrations throughout. Implications for future research and further applications are discussed.