Hotel Customer Value Research

Since 1980's, the new customer-oriented management theories, which pursue to satisfy and surpass customers' needs and desires, were first emerged in the western developed countries and then spread widely and rapidly all over the world. This is bound to happen because the corporation's manufacturing and operation activities originated from the needs of customers and ended in meeting customers' desires. However, the definition of consumer value as well as the methodology has been in the stage of research. Based on different principles,different scholars provided different comprehension, among of them, the comprehension based on value chain and the comprehension based on value project are greatly influenced. The former puts emphasis on the quality of consumer value,and latter on quantity. In addition, both of them neglect the demand of consumer. In fact, the emergence of management theories that maintain customer satisfaction and customer loyalty was due to the intensive competition market environment and the basic element of the corporations' exist, in which the "the basic element" refers to the customer satisfaction. this paper starts from the customer perspective stressed by Michael Porter and Robert Woodruff introduces the customer value concept, generalizes and relines the customer value characteristics, and demonstrates that customer value is the most important source of competitive advantage. With the help of existent research findings, this paper brings up a set of marketing to develop customer value based competitive strategy.This paper's theoretical meanings are as follows. First, this paper sorts over the existent customer value definitions, generalizes the characteristics of customer value, an proposes a more precise definition of customer value of hotel. Second, empirical researches demonstrate that customer value is the most important antecedent to competitive advantage of a hotel, and pave the way for the customer value and competitive advantage theory development. This paper's practical meaning is that a set of principles, processes, methods and tools has been developed with the help of existent...