Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Are you advertising the hospital to consumers, or are you look at advetising a product which would be bought by the hospital?

Advertising of ANYTHING starts with defining your objectives. What does success look like? How will you know if you're on the right track? Who are you trying to reach? How do they make decisions in the category?

These are marketing basics, and you really can't skip them. If you are a hospital marketing manager, you need to establish the objectives and the strategy, then find an advertising agency (or other experienced professional) who has a track record in the category (or a closely related one). Figure out what your STRATEGY will be, what media you'll need to use to reach your target audience, etc., etc.

Develop a creative brief -- essentially the document that serves as a spec sheet for the creative process. Then judge the creative submissions against that spec sheet.

This is obviously not specific to hospitals, but it certainly applies to them. I've been involved in hospital marketing and business strategy, and it's really not that different from marketing consumer products, B2B products and services, membership organizations, or anything else.

Stick to the basics. First objectives and strategies. Then tactics and execution.

Hope this helps. Where are you located? Can you provide additional details about the situation?

There is an ethical issue to anything medical. Basically, the concern is if your marketing cause someone to get a service which is not the most medically appropriate service.

Now, marketing a hospital is an interesting case. In my mind, the majority of a hospital's business comes in due to location - you have an emergency and go to the nearest one (or the ambulance takes you to the nearest one). Marketing will have little, if any, effect on this business.

It is the planned medical work, such as elective surgery, perhaps maternity, etc., where marketing a hospital may have some effect.

There is the second issue with medical marketing that the consumer (the patient) is often not the one paying for the service. So long as your hospital works with their insurance, monetary cost is often not considered.

In how you do it - the methods really aren't any different than what you would do for any other area. As mgoodman said, think of the basics. What are your 4Ps? Maybe compare your hospital to other choices (inlcuding non-hospital choices) using a SWOT?

hi kamna,

here in New Zealand hospitals are free for nz citizens. one way in which the hospital markets it self is to put ads on at the movie theatre.

this ad tells people not to go to the emergency room unless they need it. the ads aim is to get people how only have minor injuries to go and see there doctor before going to the emergency room.

this work because hospital waiting time dropped from 4 hours to 3 hours when the campaign was run.

hope this helps

Carl Crawford

Hi kamna

the marketing of Hospitals to customers depends on the country you are referring. Let me give you some background regarding hospitals of the part of the world where i live in.

fo countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, most of the people are poor and cant afford medical costs like surgery. here the medical insurance system, as seen in west, is non-existant. the only option these majority of the population have is the state-run hospitals which are in dilapidated conditions, the service is extremly poor with broken down machines, absence of quality and supply of low quality medicine and total complaints about the entire system can surpass the volume of an encyclopaedia.

In Bangladesh, untill recently, most of the patients who needed coronary surgery (bypass, angioplasty, CMC etc.) had no option of having that facility in Bangladesh and had to go abroad (mainly India, Thailand, SIngapore) and that would cost a fortune, resulting in deaths of hundreds just due to lack of treatment.

Recently in Bangladesh some state-run hospitals as well as privately run hospitals in specialized diseases like coronary/cardiac diseases have been established. The state run hospitals dont advertise at all as it is state funded and patients do come to this hospital for treatment as it is cheaper.

the privately run hospitals are more aggresive in marketing their hospitals to the general patients, as there is always an inherent doubt about the quality of treatment in state-run hospitals.

privately run Cardiac hospitals in Bangladesh market themselves mostly in 2 ways
1. the promote themselves amongst the medical/physician community.
2. promoting the success of the hospitals to the general customers/patients directly through advertisements. in the ads they publish the testimonial of the successfully operated/treated patients, pictures of the patients etc.

in both these ways they promote the notable and famous physicians and surgeons both local and foreign who are part of the hospital. Usually these physicians and surgeons are already well reputed among the physician community. So when a patients of cardiac disease visits a General Practitioner (GP), that GP refers the patient to the Cardiac Hospital where this famous surgeon or the entire team works.

hope this helps. sorry for a long post. if you have any query in this issue please contact me by email by clicking on my name.

cheers!!

Mushfique brings up an interesting point. I had heard of a lot of people going to places like Thailand for medical work. And not just people from neighboring countries who can't find the medical services they need in their own country. They have lower costs, but high quality, so draw people from all over the world. For example, I remember hearing a statistic that Thailand does the most sex change surgeries of any country.

I did a quick Google on "thailand surgery" and found quite a few hospitals marketing their services abroad, including https://phuket-plasticsurgery.com/ and https://www.bangmodhos.com/index.html. Might be worth taking a look at sites like these to see how they market themselves.

Peter, indeed you are right!!

about a week or two back (i cant remember exactly) CNN's Asia related programs highlighted the high quality medical treatment that is being offered in countries like Thailand and Singapore (BBC World also highlighted the same).

These countries are aggresively promoting their famous hospitals like Mount Elizabeth of Singapore and Bumrunrgad of Bangkok (Thailand) and patients from US and Europe (on top of asians) are availing them as these hospitals are comparatively cheaper than their native country hospitals.

interestingly, these hospitals are actually bringing in money in 2 ways to the economy. One is the revenue they generate from treatment of patients and other the tourism that associates with the treatment. After having a major surgery you stay in hospitals for sometime and then after release from hospital you just dont hop into the flight to home, you stay back in Singapore/Thailand and recuperate while enjoying the sights & sounds.

call it "Healthcare Tourism" !!

cheers!!