B2B marketing plan for Flying Stars

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to create a marketing plan for Finnish tour operator Flying Stars as the company is starting to sell honeymoon packages to Estonia acting as a destinations management company. The services are sold to Estonian tour operators who will market and sell them onward to consumers. The aim of this thesis was to find one or two potential partners for Flying Stars and provide them information about the current situation of Estonian travel markets. The thesis begins with a general introduction on the project which is followed by a brief explanation on the case company’s operations. Chapter 3 discusses the purpose, objectives and conceptual framework created to guide both writing of the theoretical and the empirical part. The process of providing Flying Stars a marketing plan suggestion started with researching the theory on marketing planning, B2B marketing, marketing of services and marketing of tourism products. The theory part of the thesis was then combined from the theoretical pieces that were relevant in creating a marketing plan for the case company. For the empirical part the writer used a structured online questionnaire that was sent to 21 Estonian tour operators in order to determine the level interest towards Flying Stars services and to find out what kind of factors they value in a destination management company. Four companies replied and they were all interested in cooperating with Flying Stars. The companies and their responses are reported and analyzed in chapter 6, together with the introduction of the research methodology. The actual marketing plan suggestion can be found in chapter 7. It begins with an analysis of the case company’s internal and external factors that have the potential to affect either negatively or positively in their attempts to move to Estonian markets. The factors are then summarized in the SWOT analysis. After the SWOT analysis the segmentation, targeting and positioning is explained. The third part in the marketing plan is the marketing mix that composes of the service description, pricing of the service, place, promotional tools used, process description and service blueprint, physical evidence of the service and people participating in the service production