Marcel Meler

Food marketing in the function of tourist product development

A tourist product should be observed as a total, i.e. integral, one, comprising material (goods) and immaterial (services) partial tourist products and partial tourist quasi‐products (being the results of a primary tourist offer that is not a result of human labor). The main idea of food marketing in foodstuff production, if observed as partial tourist products, implies that a guest, i.e. a tourist product consumer, is not only offered food and beverage as partial tourist products but that he also gets satisfied quantitatively, qualitatively, esthetically, ethnologically, gastronomically and in any other sense, including the accompanying immaterial partial tourist products, i.e. services, which will be eventually manifested in an increase in the room‐and‐board and, especially, secondary expenditures. Since the whole problem is analyzed using the example of the Republic of Croatia, simultaneously proposed are corresponding solutions in the field of food marketing that would be in the function of tourist product development.

Solving parameter estimation problem in new product diffusion models

In this paper we propose a new method for the parameter identification in new product diffusion models. The method can be used regardless of whether the analytical solution of the differential equation describing the model is known or not. This is the main advantage of our method over the known methods. Another advantage of this method is the simplicity of its implementation and negligible computing time. The method is based on finite differences method and the moving least squares method for data smoothing.