Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Hello Surbhi,

What do you want to promote

1. India tourism or
2. Indian jewellery?

FOR UK MARKET

If you clear your requirement for one subject, then answer will be ready for you.

But if i am going to do my dissertation it will be " INDIAN TOURISM AND NEW MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR EUROPE"

Mansing Bhor

I’d be inclined to agree with Puru and to focus on the “Promotion of Indian Tourism” aspect, but you do need to have a suitably academic title and a rigorous academic marketing approach to it.

As this is a post graduate dissertation (Masters or PhD?) the work will need to be original and referenced, so you can’t rely on hearsay garnered from the web (I’m probably preaching to the well tutored here, so forgive me if that is the case) Everything which is evidential in support of your argument must be referenced and anything which has not been peer reviewed must be based on a methodology which you can justify. Some of the previous suggestions would make a good topic for an article but not for a dissertation. (Shouldn’t that be a Thesis?)

An analysis into the factors which influence UK citizens to visit India is a good starting point, but it is not going to lead to much which is worthy of a post graduate paper. You really need to identify some potential areas of tourist activity which could be developed and analyse the factors which would drive the market. Then you would need to identify the sectors within the travelling pubic in order to see how you would market these niches to them.

It would be brave, but useful, to spot some possible themes which are not yet addressed – eco tourism has been mentioned, but the idea of rural tourism which does not involve being a cheese-cloth clad, bandana wearing, rucksack carrying, gap year traveller!

The aim might be to identify how a higher spending sector of the travelling British public could be tempted to go to places other than the Taj Mahal from the comfort of the Agra Hilton (If Agra has one!) by finding a way to encourage people into beautiful but unexplored rural areas.

You would also have to explore the hurdles to overcome, such as the common misconception that anything of the beaten track in India involves spending half your holiday on the toilet or throwing up and how to re-assure travellers that they will be well cared for whilst receiving a genuine novel cultural experience.

That would involve exploring the logistics on the ground in India and the logistics of both arranging marketing in the UK, distribution of the finished product, legal and insurance issues. In India, you would have to explain how you would set up the infrastructure and support systems to handle these tourists without destroying the experience you set out to create.

You would then need to look at the business economics of the venture and more importantly for a thesis, the economic impact on the geography of the target market. If it is for a business school, your profit and loss and 5 year plan for the business will be equally important.

My main concern about this paper is that unless you are very careful, you will end up with a business proposition for Kuoni Travel rather than an academic paper.

Get the language right and do the academic version, then edit it with the business case and you might have the best of both worlds!

If it takes off commercially, do let me know. I’ll go.

Regards

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions