Elements of healthcare marketing

¶ … Healthcare Marketing

The purpose of marketing is to identify the needs of consumers, determine the target markets as well as, applying products and services to serve these markets. Marketing also promotes such products and services within the market place (Pearson, 2003). The four Ps of marketing include;

Product

Products are goods and services that businesses provide for sale to their target market. Apart from physical product, there are some elements of products which are associated with products that customers may be attracted to such as the quality of the product, packages, brand name and many others. When a company such as a hospital developing a product, they consider various things such as the quality of the product, design, packaging and customer service.

Place

Marketers usually ensure that they put the right product at the right place within the right time. Place refers to the distribution channels the marketers use to get their products to the customers. Today, most businesses use internets to sell their products directly to the consumers. However, businesses that create product tend to have two options; that is: selling to a vendor or to consumers.

Price

Price refers to how much the marketers charge for their product or service. In most cases, determining the product's price has become of a great challenge to small business owners, hence they end up beginning their business by creating an impression of bargaining pricing. Today, there are a number of consideration in regards to price such as price setting, credit collection, discounting as well as, credit and cash purchases.

Promotion

Promotion is the act of communicating the benefits and value of the organization products to consumers. Promotion is how one can let the people know what is available for sale. The purpose of promotion is to get people understand the product sold. For promotion to be effective, marketers have to persuade the general consumers to become customers of their business using methods such as direct marketing, advertising, personal selling as well as, sales promotion.

Establishing the marketing function within an organization can be accomplished through pricing, product/service management, financing, promotion, selling and many other ways. For instance, promotion as a way of establishing a marketing function involves communication with customers about the products to achieve the desired result customer demand of the product. Financing on the other hand, involves budgeting for marketing activities, and providing financial assistance to customers to enable them purchase the business products and service.

The two most common organizational structures for marketing are by product and by market. By product may be best when specialized knowledge of certain products or services is needed, this usually occurs in large diversified companies. Conversely, by market may be appropriate form when a need exists to provide better service to different types of markets (Montana & Charnov, 2004).