Product management- product portfolio and recommendations Essay

Product management- product portfolio and recommendations - Essay Example Customers can search for a hotel using filters such as the city, airport, address or point of interest. Also, they can state the dates that they would like to visit these hotels. Then, they choose their rates from a drop-down menu. Finally, they click on â€Å"Find a Hotel† button, which generates the results based on the filters (Ayeh 2015). IHG has done a brilliant job with its website. However, most customers today use social media more than search engines and websites to look for information and advice. IHG has a Facebook page with 83,865 likes. However, with a company as large as itself, IHG does not frequently update its Facebook page. For example, its last update was on 8th June in which they talked about their service week. Also, some pieces of information are not relevant to the customer. For instance, the next update after the service week news was on May 7th, in which the company had announced its Q1 Interim Management Statement. Most customers do not care about such information. All they want to know is what services they will get when they visit one of IHG’s hotels (Aluri 2015). The trend seen in Facebook can also be seen on Twitter. One update was made fourteen hours ago, the next on June 12th, June 8th and so on. Although the company does a better job with Twitter than Facebook, it does not appeal to the vanity or ego of the customer. What IHG fails to do consistently is tell its customers what they will experience by visiting the hotels. Moreover, the company does not segment its customers based on the many filters available. For example, IHG boasts its presence in approximately one hundred countries. However, people from one country do not have the same tastes as people from other countries. Therefore, the same marketing methods cannot be used. Moreover, with customers shifting to social media, it is imperative that IHG’s social media pages be segmented based on the geography of