Business Accent

Re-Structure your Marketing Department

Marketing departments must include brand building in their agenda

"As the competition intensifies and the choices increase, the entire marketing function needs to be designed afresh with new scopes and new responsibilities" - Vivek Shukla The writer is Healthcare Marketing Consultant

According to Rita Mae Brown, 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.’ Going by her definition, most of us are insane to some degree, even when it comes to running our hospitals.

When it comes to business development, most hospitals keep repeating the same old practices and then wonder why results are not happening. A typical marketing department today engages itself over and over again in organising free camps, CMEs, arrangements with GPs, TPA and companies, etc. They are short of any new ideas and there is no plan or strategy for the long term. Here is a thing- no matter how many times you repeat these activities, extraordinary results will not come. It is time to break the barriers of our thinking [or the lack of it]. As the competition intensifies and the choices increase, the entire marketing function needs to be designed afresh with new scopes and new responsibilities. Not only what is being done routinely has to be looked at, new disciplines need to be also added.

Internal Marketing

I have maintained the importance of winning yourself before winning the world for a long time now. Alexander the Great was perhaps the first one to realise this. No wonder his tremendously inspired soldiers conquered many foreign lands.

Here is an inescapable logic— in the same way as soldiers cannot win a war without being patriotic, an organisation cannot win market share without empowering its own staff about its vision and values.

How many marketing departments take responsibility of ensuring the inner victory? How many times does the marketing department come out with innovative posters and other communications to inspire the staff about the vision or the core values? The internal newsletter is another important tool which can be used for internal marketing.

Customer Experience Management

The bane of our healthcare services is that often the 'service' is lacking. Ask a commoner and he will tell you that 'waiting' is synonymous with hospital. They wait endlessly for seeing a doctor, giving a blood sample, getting test reports, showing the reports to a doctor, getting admitted, getting discharged and for numerous other things. Some nonchalant doctors, nurses or staff, adds up to their woes. In short, a hospital experience is something that anyone would want to forget as quickly as possible.

Is the job of the marketing department only to fetch numbers by making tall claims? Should the marketing team not ensure that the hospital delivers on the promises that were made? Will the customers not feel cheated if their expectations are not met? Should the marketing department not liaison with the top management, doctors and the operations team and ensure that their part of the deal is kept with the customers?

Retention & Loyalty

Harvard Business Review suggests that on an average, the profit for an organisation can go up by 25 per cent if it is able to increase its customer retention by 5 per cent. Further, it is a known fact that retaining an old customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one. Add to this a fact that it is simpler to retain than to acquire.

I am yet to see a marketing department that devotes significant time and resources in ensuring that the customers are retained. All the ladies coming for ante-natal check up must keep their appointments and subsequently deliver in the same hospital. All the chronic ailment patients, their visits and monetary contribution to the hospital needs to be tracked. Who is doing it? Is there a system in your hospital that ensures and measures retention for chronic and repeat patients?

Brand Equity Creation

Perhaps. the most ubiquitous ambiguity in marketing is when people think that sales and marketing is the same thing. Even the senior most directors cannot distinguish between the two.

Marketing includes sales. But it also includes a plethora of other disciplines like market research, advertising, branding, consumer behaviour, etc. Branding, in my opinion precedes sales. Vice-versa is seldom true.

How evolved our marketing is, when it comes to brand equity creation, can be gauged by a simple test, Ask them for their positioning statement. Or ask them why they have a particular tagline for their brand. I have done this test on numerous occasions and it is needless to share the results.

To make it short and not so sweet- brand literacy is not exactly the strength of healthcare industry.

Marketing departments must include brand building in their agenda. Media planning, PR and ad campaigns, events, pioneering a social cause, etc. must be part of routine marketing activity.

Innovative Customer Acquisition

Talking about sales and acquisitions, the corporate tie ups, the TPA tie ups, field sales, international sales and camps and CMEs can fall in this category. I need not write a lot about this aspect of the marketing department because this is already being practiced.

The only word of caution I would want to add here is that the old ways of doing things have to change. Marketing and innovation according to legendary Peter Drucker are the only two investments in a business. Everything else according to him is a cost. It is high time we go knee deep into planning and organising our marketing function.

mail@vivekshukla.com