At this time it is undeniable that one of the industries that has suffered the most is tourism. I would like to highlight the contributions made by two of the most respected tourism entrepreneurs in our country, Mario Mikowski and Daniel Küng, who spoke of their experiences in past financial crises. Here are some considerations from my experience to support that idea.
Speaking of my experience, I worked for over 12 years in some of the best hotels in the country, then life led me to become the Executive Director of the Commercial Communication Companies in Costa Rica, and today I am a Senior Consultant in Customer Experience for Imagineer, from where I can contribute with some supporting arguments.
Marketing should be the last area to be cut, in fact cutting it would mean the premature closure of the company. To reach this assessment we must change the concepts that we handle, it is true that we usually say that Marketing is an investment and not an expense, but in my experience I can say that the vast majority of managers do not consider it that way; Since there is a bad internal communication and a bad handling of concepts, normally marketing is seen as communication actions. Under this preconception it is clear that marketing is seen as an expense. In addition, there is usually a divorce between marketing and sales, where marketing does not communicate to sales what it does and sales does not tell marketing if the demand it generates is not being adequate.
This leads me to the following approach. Marketing should be seen as the demand or leads generator and this means that the efforts you make must generate the quality of leads that Sales can turn into consumers. To get this we must see Marketing and Sales as "Smarketing" or the department of Revenue. Both are departments that make the cash register ring, which means that both departments must work as one, with a common goal and language, and defining the Buyer Persona, the MQL, SQL, and KPI's to indicate the achievement of the objectives.
It is clear that at this point of Covid-19 the immediate demand is affected, so it will require work to generate leads for the following months of the year and to ensure the continuity of the company.