Corporate Entertainment and the U.S. Hospitality Industry A Perfect Match

Imagine that you are looking for a place to stay. You are intent on identifying the best solution. You discover an appealing hotel offer...What made you choose this option? What makes a location to stay appealing? What features of a service result in positive opinions regarding the brand image, increased purchasing intention, and readiness to pay? What kinds of advertisements are effective? In this collaborative research project, we investigate boutique concepts and how various methods of advertising might give clients a better sense of place.Boutique concept in the service business.The service business in general is highly competitive, and in the hospitality industry, the boutique concept emerged as a means of uniqueness. It is viewed as an intimate, luxury, and exclusive service atmosphere with attractive and inventive designs; it provides consumers with unique experiences by facilitating memorable identification bonds. Today, over 5,000 boutique hotels employ almost 150,000 people in the United States, and the concept has gained special traction during the COVID-19 epidemic, with an 18% increase anticipated (IBISWorld, 2021).

Although the boutique idea is most commonly linked with hotels.

it is also used in other areas of hospitality, such as boutique restaurants, catering services, travel agencies, and culinary tourism. These services are suited for clients who prefer emotional advertising appeals over rational ones, indicating that they place a higher value on the offering's relational, experiential, aesthetic, and hedonic components than its functional ones.Our findings have been published in the journal Consumer Behavior in Tourism and Hospitality under the title "Elevating the boutique appeal: generating a sense of place in luxury hospitality through virtual tours."Sense of Place and Customer Self-IdentificationThe concept of "sense of place" guided our insights, which refers to the attractiveness of the boutique as a result of its unique blend of physical environment, social constructs, and associated meanings as they are masterfully invoked and conjured up by the service provider. This "sense of place" or "place identity" is based on self-identification processes and learning experiences in which a person makes sense of the world and distinguishes himself from others using visual, aural, and other perceptual signals.Two complementary studies were undertaken. The first is a qualitative study with 9 semi-structured interviews lasting about 1 hour each with all five managers and four available frontline staff of EPIKVS Catering Boutique, a company based in Ecuador's capital, Quito, that has been in business for over 17 years. The second study is a quantitative one, with 269 members of a Mexican consumer panel engaging in an online survey. This second study uses an experimental design to compare the hospitality appeal (boutique vs traditional luxury) and type of digital advertising (virtual tour vs static image) and their impact on the perceived hotel image, booking intentions, and willingness to pay as dependent variables, as well as how the sense of place may mediate that relationship.

Our initial study reveals that catering boutique managers

Furthermore, personnel engage in conversation with their customers in order to learn about their personal histories, such as trips, cultural experiences, personalities, and the broader social backdrop of the event. Customers like this because it increases positive affect and place identity, which leads to better behavioral results.Place identity through virtual toursThe second study, which collected data from Mexican and Ecuadorian participants, found that boutique hotel appeal is more appealing to customers (compared to traditional luxury appeals) when advertised with visually engaging virtual tours because it enhances customers' sense of place identity. Place identity, the mediating psychological mechanism, represents the important emotional component produced by boutique notions and has a positive effect on managerially significant customer outcomes such as hotel image, purchase intentions, and willingness to pay.Hospitality providers can benefit from these insights in two ways. First, the development of boutique services creates new potential for luxury hospitality companies to differentiate themselves in the market. The physical aspects of the area where the service is delivered, as well as the social interactions with staff and their related meanings, inspire a sense of place identity, which is an important resource in the process of co-creating value.

Second, the style of advertisement used to promote the hospitality service can influence positive outcomes

Service providers can take use of the novel capabilities that technology provides for their communications, as well as how these capabilities can be scaled and integrated into the design of boutique concepts. The usage of virtual tours (guided or interactive) serves as a bridge between customers' expectations of a great service experience.Marketing tactics to provide unique experiences.In conclusion, our study demonstrates that boutique concepts benefit both consumers and businesses, providing unique experiences while increasing revenues. Furthermore, by leveraging innovative technology (using dynamic visual technologies to promote hospitality services rather than traditional static visuals), service providers can differentiate themselves in the marketplace and create unique, memorable experiences for customers, resulting in pleasurable emotions and business-relevant affective responses in consumers.Marketing managers can consider implementing a comprehensive plan and differentiating characteristics, such as the use of dynamic visual technology in advertising, to boost returns on experiential marketing initiatives. A boutique concept must be in harmony with the brand name, physical proof, marketing or form of advertisement, and pricing points.