Risk Acceptability According to the Social Sciences, Essay Example

Services Marketing

Services marketing requires an entirely different approach than marketing goods. Many people are aware of the physical products they have available to them and information on such products is easier to research. On the other hand, available services are not easily understood. While many individuals know that they have these service options are available in general, they are not aware of the specifics of these options. For example, many stay at home parents are familiar with the different cleaning products available to them in stores, and are knowledgeable about the different brand and price options. However, these individuals are not as aware of the cleaning services options they have available to them if they were to hire someone to do the cleaning for them. This problem stems primarily from the fact that it is more difficult to sell services than goods because it is harder to market. Many different companies offer similar services, so it is hard for these organizations to distinguish themselves from competitors. In addition, the operations of many service organizations run on a small scale, so it is challenging to generate a significant marketing audience both in terms of cost and accessibility of the target population.

This problem becomes even more prominent when the public requires the certain set of services delivered as at various points in their lives. As such, hospitals have a challenging time competing because people typically go to the institutions that are the closest, depending on their particular need. When these needs aren’t urgent, they will generally attend the hospital with the best reputation or consult friends and family to determine if they could recommend a practitioner that may not necessarily be affiliated with a hospital. Despite these challenges, many hospitals require profitability and wish to expand, and thus must find ways to communicate with potential requirements regarding the services they can offer. This process is challenging for different hospitals. Many are situated in populous areas and have positive reputations, which help them get much of the business they desire. However, when this is not the case, it is difficult to attract traffic. Furthermore, different challenges arise for public and private hospitals, as these institutions have different degrees of notoriety. For example, Grace Hospital is well-known for being a private hospital option, while the Tauranga Hospital is a public hospital in the same region. As a consequence, these institutions are competing with each other in addition to the other hospitals present in their region and in the country, as individuals may be willing to travel far in order to receive the best possible care.

Background

Health care expenses can be high, and this expense depends on whether the patient wishes to visit a public or private health care institution. As a consequence, it is beneficial for the marketing of such services to be targeted; wealthier individuals could afford the higher costs at some of the private hospitals, while working class citizens may need to forgo these luxuries and attend a public hospital. In addition, it is important to consider that despite the public or private status of a hospital, the quality of services that patients receive in addition to the specific types of medicine that the hospitals form can differ significantly. Therefore, it is important to market hospitals in a manner that will highlight a purpose that they could effectively serve to benefit their clients. As a consequence, it may be reasonable to market public hospitals as trauma centers, and an excellent place to go for an emergency, while it may be more reasonable for private hospitals to promote themselves in terms of the specialized care they provide, such as extensive cancer treatment.

An additional approach that hospitals take when advertising themselves is to highlight the state of the art doctors and health care workers that they have at their facilities. This can be enhanced by discussing the medical research that these doctors are involved in and how this makes the institution ideal for the treatment of certain disorders. In health care marketing, it is important to make the health care institution appear as if it is the expert in its particular medical field and to persuade clients to come to the hospital on this basis. While many goods and services are advertised in a manner that emphasizes price or affordability, it is important to forgo this convention for health care advertisements because these services are typically deemed to be very expensive and necessary. Therefore, providing the price is not necessary because it is the quality of service, rather than affordability, that hospital’s attempt to promote.

Account of Service Encounter

I have needed to visit Grace Hospital for a broken leg and found that the quality of care at this institution was excellent. From the moment I walked in the door, I was greeted by a staff of nurses and was brought to see the doctor immediately, who had my x-rays done and confirmed that I had suffered a fracture. Shortly afterwards, he explained to me what I would need to do to recover from the incident, such as keeping my leg elevated and not putting pressure on it. After icing my leg to reduce swelling, he casted it and provided me with crutches, and then personally contacted my friends and family members to let them know that I was okay. Since hospitals are occasionally associated with long wait times, I was pleasantly surprised with Grace Hospital’s ability to efficiently treat my wound and send me on my way. My doctor was very knowledgeable and didn’t seem to be in a rush to get me to leave, as it seemed that he wanted to answer all of my questions. Furthermore, it appeared that my care was personalized, which was evident by the team the doctor recruited to help me during my stay. They aimed to make sure I was comfortable during this process, which helped this feel less stressful.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that I broke a bone, and for my first visit, I went to Tauranga Hospital. Like Grace Hospital, I visited purely because this was the closest hospital to me when I had my accident. However, unlike Grace Hospital, there were very long wait times and I didn’t feel that I had as much time with my doctor as needed. When I was eventually sent home, I had spent a total of 5 hours in the facility and most of this time was spent simply waiting for available nurses, doctors, and technicians. Overall, Grace Hospital appeared to be better staffed, which allowed this problem to be avoided.

Analysis of Experience

There is a high degree of perceived risk in the health care setting (Douglas, 1985). Without having attended a hospital in the past, patients are not certain about what their experiences will be. As a consequence, they often go to the hospital that is closest to them in order to avoid spending a long time traveling and still receiving compromised service. Furthermore, when individuals do select hospitals, they prefer to do so on the basis of word of mouth because they likely to believe that the positive experiences of their friends and family members help reduce the inherent risk of   this situation. Hospitals can contribute to this effect by their marketing patterns as well. By providing the public with promotional advertisements on television, online, or in the newspapers, potential clients will begin to develop a sense of trust and familiarity with respect to the advertising hospital. The advertisements that are able to connect with patients on a more personal level will be more likely to succeed as a result. Therefore, in a sense, health care organizations can direct the perceived risk by offering and promoting quality services.

The marketing mix for services is also a necessary consideration for hospitals in this industry (McCarthy, 1964). In the modern world, many people look for health care professionals using an online search when they are not familiar with an alternative starting point. As a consequence, it is important for the websites of all hospitals to contain comprehensive databases of their physicians and other medical professionals to highlight their capabilities and expertise. Furthermore, paid online advertising is an effective way to direct interested individuals to the hospital’s website. When these individuals search for relevant terms in the major search engines, the hospital’s advertisement has a chance of popping up and an interested patient may click on it. This is an effective method because it is cost effective and allows the hospital to reach a broad audience. In addition, many hospitals elect to have television commercials in which a patient or a physician talks about the hospital’s services. The goal of such commercials is to make the potential patient trust the organization and to consider travelling to it for treatment, such as the kinds that are discussed in the commercial. Both of these forms of advertisement create a sense of trust among the client because familiarity is key to developing trust in this service setting.

Service as theater is somewhat applicable to this field as well. Clients perceive that services are of higher quality when they are treated with a good bedside manner and feel that they are the focus of their health care providers (Grove, 1992). I experienced this first hand as a patient at Grace Hospital because health care workers were constantly available to answer my questions and deliver services. This was important because it provided me with a sense of their professionalism that similar public hospitals that I have attended were not able to convey. Furthermore, while it is apparent that perhaps not all of these medical professionals would behave in this manner towards me without this being an expectation, they played their roles well in order to ensure that I would be able to quickly get the services and help that I required.

The service blueprint for this industry is important, and may vary depending upon the particular institution surveyed (Shostack, 1984). The service blueprint for Grace Hospital is as follows:

• Physical Evidence: Wheel chairs at the front of the hospital, sliding glass doors, organized front desk, many patient consulting rooms, cure rates.
• Customer Actions: Customers are responsible for travelling to the hospital or establishing contact with the hospital if they determine that they require care. Customers must also sign themselves into the hospital and provide the system with payment.
• Onstage Contact Employee Actions: Employees will receive the patient at the front entrance and bring the patient to the inpatient counter. They will then deliver the patient to the examination room, and then to the respective technical departments that are necessary to fulfill the examination.
• Backstage (Invisible Contact Employee) Actions: Keeping the facilities clean and records organized, the doctor will consult the nurses and technician staff to determine the proper diagnosis, the continued education and training of all employees.
• Support Processes: Medical billing, support staff at the front of the hospital.

Recommendations

It would be beneficial for hospitals to establish their presence in the physical setting as well as online and on television. This could be conducted by purchasing billboards and other forms of advertisements that commuters will see as they travel to work. While this would be more beneficial on highways and expressways with large amount of traffic, it would be valuable to an extent on less populous roads depending upon the proximity of these roads to the hospital. If an advertisement is placed at a site in which it is not the closest hospital to the location, it would be important for the organization to promote services that the potential client would not have an immediate need for. Rather, it should present a form of care such as genetic screening or chemotherapy infusion that would afford them an ability to make a decision concerning who they want to deliver this care.

It is important for hospitals to improve their popularity by maintaining their quality of services. Because a majority of this marketing is done through word of mouth advertising, it would be beneficial for hospitals to do all they can to ensure that any words spoken about their institution is in a positive light. Hospitals such as Grace Hospital accomplish this well because they do their best to ensure that the needs of their clients are met. Rather than treating the hospital as merely a treatment facility, they are viewed as a positive experience because they implement a component of customer service into their operations. For other hospitals to benefit from this equally, it would be beneficial for them to being to implement greater extents of customer service values into their personal practices.

In conclusion, services marketing hospitals can maximize their marketing capabilities by expanding to the physical market and by improving their practices online and with their television ads. Advertisements are particularly effective when proximity is not an issue for clients. As a consequence, hospitals benefit when they advertise services in a manner that promote their excellence in their chosen medical field. This allows potential patients to gain a greater trust in the institution, which will allow them to select one hospital for care over the several other options that they have available to them.

References

Douglas, Mary. (1985). Risk Acceptability According to the Social Sciences. Russell Sage Foundation.

Grove, S.J. The Service Experience As Theater. Retrieved from http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=7341

McCarthy, Jerome E. (1964). Basic Marketing. A Managerial Approach. Homewood, IL: Irwin.

Shostack, G. Lynne. Designing Services that Deliver.  Harvard Business Review, 62(1): 133–139.