Market Segmentation How Does Your

Market Segmentation

How does your selected health care organization segment the market(s) that it serves?

The segmentation of the market by the health clinic is defined first by demographics and second by lifecycle-based criterion. The demographic segmentation is the easiest to accomplish as medical disciplines align to these stages of patient's lives. There are pediatricians, general practitioners, and gerontologists on staff, with the majority of patents falling into the very young and very old. Demographically driven segmentation has made the clinic's marketing campaigns easier to plan and execute over time, and has also led to the clinic being recognized as a leading provider of infant care in the area.

A secondary segmentation criterion are the lifestyle segments that the clinic casters to, specifically orthopedics and sports injuries. This area of the clinic has walk-ins that often must be seen immediately to help alleviate patient pain and also minimize swelling of wounds that would make longer-term treatment extremely difficult. Segmenting a market based on the timeframes necessary to deliver services, factoring in customer expectations of performance, can be a powerful way to differentiate in crowded markets (Ziv, Shanthikumar, George, Carmon, 1995). This is precisely how the clinic is working with orthopedic patients and those whose children require urgent care, in order to stay more relevant to these patients as more competitors enter the market. This is an entirely different dimension to the purely demographic-based approach to segmentation, which stresses a lifecycle-based approach to providing health services. Because of concentrating on time-sensitive services, the company has been able to attain a much higher level of customer loyalty as well, leading to more referrals over time. When a healthcare organization creates opportunities for patients to have greater control over their time and works to close the gap between expectations and experiences, customer satisfaction and loyalty increase significantly (Ziv, Shanthikumar, George, Carmon, 1995). It appears from the approaches taken for time-sensitive treatments that this approach is working well for the local clinic, which has seen an increase in orthopedic visits and more listings as a provider of time-critical urgent care for infants by local hospitals.

2. What is your organization's target market(s)?

The target markets are children up to 12 years of age, general practitioner or family practice, geriatrics and a specialty area of orthopedics given how many sports teams are in the area. Our clinic focuses on urgent care for orthopedic injuries as these are often time-sensitive in terms of the treatment needed. Our focus on measuring wait times and response times has aided our segmentation efforts as well and efforts to create a reputation for timely, excellent service. This is consistent with findings in the field of segmentation when studied from a customer experience and expectations standpoint (Ziv, Shanthikumar, George, Carmon, 1995).

3. How are your organization's services positioned to meet the demands of its target market (s)?