Strategic Hospitality MarketingCornell

Certificate Program

Services marketing is often viewed in terms of outcomes, but services marketing is also an ongoing analytic process. In this course, you will learn how to properly analyze frameworks, tools, channels, data sets, customer behavioral data, decision-making factors, and strategies that support broader marketing decisions.

Authored by Robert Kwortnik from Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, this course will teach you how to review the way marketing works in your organization and how to create and apply a services marketing process.

Your services marketing efforts depend on information. Without relevant and accurate information, every decision you make will suffer from bad input. 

A well-run marketing information system captures, organizes, analyzes, and interprets data from a wide variety of sources to create a robust portrait of the ideal customers and their specific wants or needs. With the ideal buyer in mind, you can better target them with high-impact messaging that communicates a compelling brand promise and a clear reason to buy. 

In this course, you will learn when to use internal or external market data and when to conduct your own primary research. You'll also discover how segmentation, targeting, and positioning (the STP process) translates your analysis and research findings into a positioning strategy that appeals to the right target market at the right time and at the right price. 

You have marketing goals and you're feeling ready to execute. Maybe you want to increase market share, retain more customers or generally broaden consumer awareness. 

But how do you turn your goals into action? And how will you measure success? In this course, you will explore how to turn marketing goals into action by developing a marketing strategy and creating an enduring brand promise.

You want your marketing efforts to generate demand. While increased demand naturally drives business and success, it does come with specific sets of challenges. 

Mitigating these challenges requires a keen understanding of demand management. In essence, demand management requires us to ask “How should we set our prices?” “How will we guarantee that our distribution partners ensure timely delivery?”

In this course, you'll answer those questions and explore how pricing and distribution strategies can directly affect demand for your service.

It's hard to overstate: A marketing strategy lives or dies in communication with the customer. And there's a methodology to it—it is the culmination of all of the marketing research and analysis you've done. 

What you say, how you say it, how often you say it, the media channels you use to distribute your message, how you respond to complaints—all of this affects customers' experiences with your brand. 

In this course, you'll take a deep dive into integrated marketing communications, or IMC. You'll explore a process-based approach to designing creative communications using a variety of methods and media. Finally, you'll examine ways to assess the performance of an IMC campaign.

Symposium sessions feature two days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Hospitality Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll discuss how both day-to-day operations and strategic goal setting in the hospitality sector have rapidly evolved over the past two years, opening up new space for real-time conversations about the future of the industry. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to various areas of the industry, examining the innovations and accommodations you have all had to make throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and strategizing on future directions. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across the industry.

Upcoming Symposium: April 1 and 2, 2025

• Tuesday, April 1, 2025 11:00AM ET – 1:00PM ET
  • Session title pending
• Wednesday, April 2, 2025 11:00AM ET – 1:00PM ET
  • Session title pending

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.

Symposium sessions feature two days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Marketing Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll share experiences from across the industry, inspiring real-time conversations about best practices, innovation, and the future of marketing work. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to some of the most pressing topics and trends in the marketing field. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across the industry.

Upcoming Symposium: March 11th – 12th, 2025: 

• Tuesday, March 11, 2025 11AM – 1PM ET
• Wednesday, March 12, 2025 11AM – 1PM ET

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.