Health Care
Question 1
When establishing the product element of the marketing mix, a company must decide its product mix, product line, and its breadth and depth. Pick a Hospital or any health services facility you are working for, or you are familiar with, and describe the product (service) mix that facility is offering. Based on your experience with that facility, is it possible to modify the product mix by eliminating, adding, services? If yes, why? If not, why?
Question 2
Transparency is a growing factor in health care. You have been hired to consult with a group of cardiologists who have just developed their first website.
The practice is located in a in a medium-sized community where there are 3 other cardiology practices. Present the pros and cons for them in developing a proactive approach to transparency on their website. Some of the partners in the practice are strongly opposed to providing any metrics on the site.
Question 3
Loyal customers offer multiple benefits to a healthcare organization. What are some of these benefits? How can loyalty be measured from a marketing approach? Find one example of a loyalty program in the healthcare industry, and comment on it. Is there in the program content any room for improvements?
Question 4
Visit the websites of two major healthcare providers, Mayo clinic (https://www.mayoclinic.org) and Cleveland clinic (https://my.clevelandclinic.org).
Which one do you believe does a better job in promoting its services and why? And why is the other website not as good and how could it be improved?
Question 5
At a recent strategic planning retreat of a 40person multispecialty group, the administrator made a presentation that focused on the coming year’s plans to establish the organization’s first two primary care satellites, which would be located in the two growing suburbs of the community. These new additions would require the hiring of four family practitioners and other support staff. When the administrator finished her presentation, one of the most senior physicians stood up and said, “This is a foolish expenditure. We’re so busy now in this group, we can’t even see another patient. Our revenue was up 14 percent according to the previous financial presentation we heard. There is no reason to change what we’re doing.” How might you respond to this physician?
Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is an essential factor in any market because customer loyalty encourages customer retention. Customer loyalty is vital in healthcare because it leads to customer retention, which leads to a wide variety of benefits such as patient referrals. If a hospital retains the same patient and the patient is happy with the services they are getting from the hospital, they are likely to refer another person to the hospital, which is suitable for the hospital because it increases the customer base (Gambarov et al., 2017). If an organization successfully implements a customer loyalty program, the organization will have a good return on the investment in the program because they are likely to have return patients and referrals. The organization will also receive praise from the patients, which gives the organization popularity.
Loyalty can be measured in different ways from a marketing approach. For example, one way of measuring loyalty is by measuring the customer repurchase ratio (Philips, n.d). Another way of measuring customer loyalty is by keeping the customer engagement score. This can be measured by how much customers engage the services of the healthcare facility and the brand of the facility.
An example of a customer loyalty program is local perks, where the customer receives a series of local perks from the hospital. An example of this is whereby the hospital partners with restaurants, hotels, and other businesses such that their loyal patients are given discounts and other benefits. Another loyalty program is whereby a healthcare facility sets up free checkups for loyal patients. Healthcare facilities also have a chance to install loyalty in their customers by starting free checkups and perks for new patients because in doing so, they attract more patients. However, there is always room for improvement in marketing, and therefore healthcare facilities can do better in attracting more customers.
References
Gambarov, V., Sarno, D., Hysa, X., Calabrese, M., & Bilotta, A. (2017). The role of loyalty programs in healthcare service ecosystems. The TQM Journal.
Phillips, R. Bringing Customer-Centric Tools and Loyalty Programs Commonly found in Retail to Healthcare, Customer Evolution is helping Health Systems and Patients to better Connect and Manage their Relationships.
