Rob Kwortnik, Associate Professor of Services Marketing, joined Cornell’s faculty after earning his Ph.D. in Business Administration from Temple University in 2003. He also earned a B.A. in Journalism from Temple and an MBA from California State University, Northridge. Professor Kwortnik’s research focuses on consumer behavior in service contexts, with special attention to service experience management. He has published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Service Research, The International Journal of Research in Marketing, and the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, among others. He has been honored eight times as a Teacher of the Year by students at The Hotel School. Prior to his career in academics, Professor Kwortnik held several professional positions in marketing and was a travel industry consultant. He is a recognized expert on the leisure cruise industry.

Advanced Hospitality Strategic Marketing and Brand Innovation
Overview and Courses
While marketing your hospitality services and brand, success ultimately depends upon knowing what target customers want and aligning it with the value your organization or property delivers. This requires an integrated strategy that includes market analysis and demand management, marketing strategy, brand management, and marketing communications. Developing a strategy to effectively communicate and differentiate your brand promise is crucial to driving the demand required in an increasingly competitive hospitality environment.
This blended certificate program, which begins with a series of online courses and culminates in a four-day capstone experience at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, New York, prepares you to deliver memorable experiences, exceed customer expectations, gain competitive advantage, and ultimately position your company for success.
After completing the online courses, you will travel to the Cornell campus* to work with faculty experts and hospitality professionals from around the world to further explore hospitality marketing and brand innovation via hands-on activities, interactive case studies, and team assignments. Combining the latest in thought leadership on brands with experiential exercises and case studies, you’ll master practical approaches for addressing strategic marketing challenges to improve revenue, profit, and customer loyalty. You’ll walk away with new skills and best practices, a powerful network of international colleagues and affiliate membership in the Cornell Hotel Society.
This advanced certificate program is part of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration’s Anheuser-Busch Professional Development Program (PDP). First launched in 1928, this world renowned executive program has welcomed hospitality professionals from around the world for over 90 years. Please review Frequently Asked Questions about the program here, including information about traveling to Cornell.
*If it is not possible to travel to the Cornell campus due to COVID-19 restrictions, you will have the option to transfer to a future date, or receive a refund for the in-person portion of your registration.
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.
The Advanced Hospitality Strategic Marketing and Brand Innovation Capstone, part of the Cornell Professional Development Program, is the on-campus component that results in the completion of your advanced certificate. It takes place at the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, NY, at the renowned School of Hotel Administration.
Over four intensive days, you will tackle marketing and brand challenges and collaborate with a network of peers to expand the foundation of your hospitality knowledge.
Days 1 and 2: Creating Value Through Strategic Hospitality Marketing
In this on-campus faculty-led intensive, you'll engage with innovative and practical approaches for addressing strategic marketing challenges to improve revenue, profit, and customer loyalty. Through class discussions, case studies, and real-world examples, you'll learn the latest applications of strategic thinking and analysis to marketing challenges facing the hospitality industry. Case studies and examples will be drawn from hotels, restaurants, and other world-class hospitality firms around the globe. You will walk away with new ideas to significantly improve your business practices then apply these ideas, concepts, and principles from best-practice examples to develop innovative and profitable solutions.
Days 3 and 4: Hospitality Brand Innovation
Brands have become the central organizing principle of most hospitality organizations, guiding every decision and every action. Combining the latest in thought leadership with experiential exercises and case studies, you'll explore how to manage a brand for increased customer loyalty, market advantage, and profitability. Using a proprietary 8P hospitality brand innovation model along with case studies, insights from published research on brand management, and in-class exercises, you'll engage with the essential elements of creating, sustaining, and strengthening your brand.
How It Works
Ithaca, NY
Ithaca, NY
Faculty Authors
- Digital Marketing 360
- Social Media Marketing
- General Managers Program
- Advanced Hospitality Strategic Marketing and Brand Innovation
- Advanced Hospitality Management
- Management 360
- Integrated Marketing 360
- Revenue Management 360
- Hospitality Management 360
- Strategic Hospitality Marketing
- Hospitality Management
- Hospitality Digital Marketing
Chekitan S. Dev is professor of marketing at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration in the SC Johnson College of Business. Since 1986, Professor Dev has taught over 15,000 students and executives both on campus and throughout the world. He is internationally recognized for his teaching and course development and has received multiple awards for teaching excellence from undergraduate students, graduate students, and Ernst & Young.
A globally renowned thought leader with over 125 publications to his credit, Professor Dev is recognized as a leading expert on service branding. He has published his work in some of the highest quality refereed journals, including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. His work has been presented at the world’s best business schools including Harvard, Wharton, Chicago, Oxford, ESSEC, Indian Business School and National University of Singapore. Recent research awards he has won include a 2017 Best Service Paper Award (finalist), a 2016 Cornell Hotel School Dean’s Academic Excellence Award, a 2016 Industry Relevance Award, and a 2014 Best Paper (runner-up) Award from INFORMS.
- Analyze your organization’s marketing approach and make strategic decisions to optimize your efforts
- Target your consumers at the right time and through the right channels
- Develop a service strategy that elevates and supports your brand
- Meet customer demand with creative pricing and distribution strategies
- Create effective marketing communications that drive demand and engagement for your services
- Analyze concepts of strategy and strategic planning as well as the ways in which both guide all marketing decisions
- Explore the use of consumer research as the foundation of strategy development
- Diagnose and analyze contemporary brand management challenges facing hospitality brands to develop innovative, practical, and profitable solutions


- Advanced Hospitality Strategic Marketing and Brand Innovation Certificate from Cornell School of Hotel Administration
- 92 Professional Development Hours (9.2 CEUs)
Who Should Enroll
- Hospitality marketing and operations professionals
- Industry professionals interested in analyzing hospitality marketing data to make strategic decisions
- Hospitality marketing managers and professionals who communicate with customers

{Anytime, anywhere.}

$8,500
Advanced Hospitality Strategic Marketing and Brand Innovation
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