Digital transformation remains the most revolutionary aspect shaping the evolution of healthcare marketing. Product and service marketing has been explosively impacted by digital platforms leading to transformational changes in the health protection approach to reaching clients (Nabi, 2015). Among the transformative innovation in technology leading the evolution of advertising include patient portals, electronic health record systems, digital imaging systems, and automation systems (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). Other critical revolutionaries leading the evolution in care promotion include customer relations management systems, sophistical software technologies for hospital websites, the emergence of ecommerce, digital multi-channel marketing, social media, and mainstream media services (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). The evolution in marketing involves adopting strategies that seek to appeal to each client’s unique needs (Nabi, 2015). The advertisements through the platforms focus on the client’s emotional, psychological, cognitive, and physical well-being and strategies such as messages to capture these needs. As a result, the advancement of promotion strategies has focused on three core pillars: customer demands as a standard, data-centred advertising, and medical consumerism.
Customer-Centred Marketing: A Revolutionary Approach to Increasing Clientele in the Competitive Sector
The modern foundation of healthcare marketing is focused on the emotional modelling of the ads to promote the values and virtues of sympathy, empathy, and care the sector has for the affected children and their loved ones. Using emotional appeal as an advertisement model, the region essentially projects itself as the sole source of hope for the patient to receive the most effective, affordable, and top-notch medical care (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). The emotional appeal invokes different psychological reactions and emotional feelings in the target clients and will eventually help promote the needed desire to seek medication within the facility (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). An example of the emotional appeal effects of the messaging is the pain solution.
The message seeks to share in the pain of the loved ones and promises to go the extra mile to ensure that the patient is given comfort, treated, and given the needed medical care with the hope of full recovery within the shortest time (Nabi, 2015). Secondly, the advertisement using an emotional perspective promotes values such as empathy, sympathy, and care. These values are critical to the affected family since the sickness emotionally, psychologically, and physically drains them (Nabi, 2015). Thirdly, the message appeals to the compassionate nature of the sector (Nabi, 2015). Through appealing to the subject of empathy, the region gives the parents the needed assurance and hope that it is willing and ready to take the journey of hope together in the treatment and healing process of the patient.
The division engages in evidence-based marketing development and product placement through systemic study and research of its segmented promotion platforms and targets. The healthcare sector analyzes the customers’ use of social media to determine the best platforms (Fahmi et al., 2017). Through such platforms, healthcare collects surveys about the background of promotion needs, especially for local and international customers (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). The research’s critical perspectives capture elements such as social media’s role as a marketing tool in general and the role and impact of social media promotion on customers. Therefore, such perspectives help to demystify the future of social media advertising among target consumers.
Another notable aspect of the marketing research used is contrasting the traditional advertising and social media advertising methods in customers and how these transitional prospects of social media spells hope for healthcare in a competitive environment (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). Moreover, the approach underscores customers’ importance in increasing healthcare growth to sustain and increase the ranking, as exhibited through competitive consumer pricing and feedback indices. Through such data, healthcare can build superior market brands, lasting positive attribution by the customers and other stakeholders (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). The positive ratings give the facility an added advantage over its competitors through customer management and feedback.
The sector’s strategic marketing focuses on customer relationships, customer management, and feedback assessment to improve loyalty and return clients. Such effective marketing through customer retention is highly subjective to the highly prolific and adaptive leadership who acts as the core marketers of the healthcare region (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). Successful promotion through services ensures that negative implications that may affect the brand are fully removed. A major implication of failing to make the customer a priority is that the customers may not find the right environment to enjoy the services rendered; hence, the organization’s overall performance reduces (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). Successful customer satisfaction is an assurance of continued loyalty and referrals. Without prioritizing customer experiences, such objects of successful production processes may not be realized. Failing to prioritize customer experiences kills the healthcare sector’s conversion rate, increasing negative feedback and a negative public image of the healthcare business (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). With a holistic framework of successful customer service, the healthcare business may find it easier to develop its processes due to poor traffic of customers reducing their regular financial performance. Such traffic entirely affects the organization’s overall strength and financial access. Hence, customer satisfaction is critical in the marketing structure of the healthcare industry.
Customer experience, therefore, is a leading evolutionary marketing strategy of the healthcare sector. Customer experience is critical for operations as it determines the holistic well-being of the service system established by the healthcare sector (Sahlabadi et al., 2022). The underlying influence of customer experiences includes determining the efficacy of the service organization’s employees, clinical officers, and other customers/members (Grębosz-Krawczyk & Olender, 2018). Through these combined effects, how customers interact with the products can rate their efficacy, productivity, compliance with service protocols, and the holistic culture of service provision within the service facilities (Grębosz-Krawczyk & Olender, 2018). Customer experience, therefore, determines the outcome of the healthcare sector’s holistic performance in terms of financial growth rate based on the services offered (Grębosz-Krawczyk & Olender, 2018). Therefore, holistically, the customer experiences benchmark the most important features of the industry and ensure the healthcare sector complies with the right procedures and systems of production service.
Data-Centred Marketing: A Proactive Approach by The Industry
The healthcare sector operates in a care industry that has seen massive disruptions based on technology. The care industry utilizes unconventional business models such as low prices, customer services, and partnerships to sustain its competitive edge (Schwartz & Woloshin, 2019). Success in the industry can be directly attributed to its massive marketing, customer segmentation, extensive online presence, effective SWOT analysis, and adaptive leadership that responds to customer needs and centricities. The data used in the business rides on extensive social and mainstream media presence. The extensive online marketing data strategy is blended with local and international media coverage, especially regular entertainment magazines, podcasts, direct mail marketing, and entertainment events (Schwartz & Woloshin, 2019).
Furthermore, the healthcare sector has a grand presence through its global agencies and marketers by going live on selected social media outlets like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (Fahmi et al., 2017). The multi-network marketing compilation ensures full access to potential healthcare clients. Consequently, healthcare uses an umbrella market strategy involving mainstream media, social media, celebrity advertisement, and offline partnerships with leading organizations such as police, military, and research firms (Schwartz & Woloshin, 2019). This massive collation of all potential avenues of advertisement puts the healthcare sector’s products. As a result, the focus of global entertainment commerce consequently shapes the care industry’s perception, quality, and perspective of innovation using appropriate data.
Data in the healthcare sector is core in determining pricing models for services and products. The industry utilizes a vast data market to achieve the best online advertising strategies (Fahmi et al., 2017). Access to data-centric information through cloud computing provides the healthcare sector with the required understanding of the predictive realignment of customer tastes, preferences, and attitudes and their development patterns (Fahmi et al., 2017). The healthcare sector’s marketing through the pricing model relies on the maximum financial use of lean costs, with the average cost becoming lower than standard industry costs (Fahmi et al., 2017). Hence, the healthcare business has made a superior market brand and long-term affirmative attribution by the customers and other stakeholders (Schwartz & Woloshin, 2019). The positive ratings give the healthcare industry an added advantage over its competitors. Hence, the organization has successfully infiltrated the low and high-end customer categories and achieved its expectations.
Additionally, incorporating product markers and e-advertisement platforms consolidates cross-channel access and information penetration (Schwartz & Woloshin, 2019). The trail always leads the potential customers to the main site of the healthcare business through elaborate systemic linkages that connect the cross-channel product domains to the main site (Fahmi et al., 2017). Therefore, this guide gives the healthcare industry the needed information on improving its services to further its quest to acquire a competitive stake in the e-commerce sector, bolstering its adaptation to changing lifestyles.
The healthcare industry moves with trends and lifestyles; currently, social media are the major interaction points among potential customers and provide the sector’s largest source of cheap marketing practices (Fahmi et al., 2017). Hence, the sector accesses a lot of potential customers with highly cheap costs when they advertise through social media compared to mainstream media. Technology is repaving critical aspects of the sector’s operations and management (Fahmi et al., 2017). Successful leveraging of these new technologies ensures the sector’s survival in consumer behaviour and cultures’ fast-changing patterns (Schwartz & Woloshin, 2019). By leveraging the right advertising patterns, the industry can successfully recruit customers, retain customers, and build program brands across a competitive market.
Health Promotionas A Frontier for Healthcare Marketing
Evolutionary marketing in healthcare is also focused on specific-health issue education, awareness, and promoting relevant products towards such healthcare issues. Health promotion is an education and training program by public health officers seeking to promote active public education on a selected health condition that affects the target audience (Bastable et al., 2019). The program, primarily driven by the officers in conjunction with other health departments, helps sensitize the population towards reducing the morbidity and mortality associated with the condition by actively participating in screening and medication programs. The initiative brings together healthcare providers, government departments of health, and the community to scale down the effects of the selected condition among the target population (Bastable et al., 2019).
The program Health People 2030 (HP 2030) is an extension of the health objective Health People 2020 (Iliffe & Manthorpe, 2021). According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (n.d), HP 2030, initiated by the United States government, aims at furthering the achievements of the HP2020 healthcare initiatives. This initiative focuses on advancing comprehensive public health tuition and control of existing medical conditions in the communities (U.S Department of Health and Human Services, n.d). Through the program, the government initiates statistics-based objectives toward identifying, monitoring, screening, and managing health conditions that affect Americans (Bastable et al., 2019). The promotion documents and HP2030 program by the government establish a presentation plan aimed at a particular audience. The promotion plan captures the health care specific-issue status, the condition to create awareness for, the objectives of the awareness, and the promotion scheme towards increasing public presence for education (Bastable et al., 2019). In health promotion, marketing involves a series of ways, such as printing colourful flyers online to be shared on social media platforms that are common within the target community (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, n.d). Online retailing will involve partnering with other health educators and community leaders to reach a wider audience (Bastable et al., 2019). Other ways of promoting the program are through posting physical flyers and posters in areas such as schools, churches, recreational facilities, shops, and billboards in the local community.
Modern Healthcare Marketing Through Medical Consumerism
Among the biggest evolutionary approaches to healthcare marketing is the commodification of healthcare products personification of drugs and care services through medical consumerism (Bellieni, 2019). Contextualizing the utilization of personalized health goods consumption patterns, the consumerism fragmentation enables patients to consume health products in accordance with their requirements rather than the intended clinical purpose of such pharmaceuticals (Iliffe & Manthorpe, 2021). Consumers have successfully fragmented their clinical service requirements through health fragmentation, depending on their own subjective wants and body design goals rather than on the coordinated hospital system recommendation from care providers (Iliffe & Manthorpe, 2021). As a result of health-related fragmentation, consumers no longer view themselves as patients inside the care system but rather as movers of pharmaceuticals through self-prescribed consumption (Bellieni, 2019). Hence, the main focus of medical consumerism marketing is the promotion of healthcare products consumption and lifestyle as opposed to drugs through fragmentation of pharmaceutical services.
Fragmentation of clinical care services into patterns of pharmaceutical product consumption as opposed to being patients is driven by the need to promote certain physical or psychological needs (Parry, 2017). Pursuing the fragmented body needs through elements such as weight pills is geared toward promoting pill consumerism instead of specific health lifestyles such as dietary and fitness processes (Iliffe & Manthorpe, 2021). Through this form of medical consumer fragmentation, the focus is to promote specific pharmaceutical products geared towards advancing particular health agendas such as sexual prowess, physical fitness, trimmed tummy, and ribbed body.
Pharmaceutical consumerism focuses on the fragmented pursuit among their consumers to achieve admirable physical body fitness as “body contouring: a celebrity-loved treatment” (Iliffe & Manthorpe, 2021, p. 185). Pursuing a celebrity-like body structure drives pharmaceutical contouring products, becoming a major factor in promoting and advancing certain medical products that can lead to achieving particular body needs (Iliffe & Manthorpe, 2021). Central to this pursuit of the celebrity-like body structure is the desire to address the body contour needs through pill consumption instead of living a healthy life (Oldan, 2004). The desire for a certain shape or size fails to address certain determinants of health, such as reducing a sedentary lifestyle and consuming unhealthy food. Successful development and revolutionary fragmentation of healthcare products and services-related marketing are advanced by innovations in biomedicine.
The advancement of pharmaceutical consumerism has led to the massive commodification of products and services, focusing on successfully inculcating medically-driven lifestyles among consumers. In traditional healthcare systems, the central theme of clinical care was to cure diseases, manage untreatable conditions and prevent certain conditions (Iliffe & Manthorpe, 2021). The present clinical spheres driven by commodification are due to the need among the pharma industry players to promote consumerism by letting the consumers see medical products as consumables like other products (Nabi, 2015). Through high-tech treatment and unnecessary procedures such as to advance better physical features and lifestyle pills, biomedicine has created an epicentre of pharmaceutical consumerism aimed at promoting profits and advancing better market prospects for the pharma players (Nabi, 2015). Therefore, clinical consumerism marketing is highly advanced in the digital age and revolution.
The digital age remains the highly idealistic platform to promote the entire concept of pharmaceutical consumerism. The centre-bolt of digital clinical consumerism pursuit is using athletes, wrestlers, and celebrities to advance the use of certain medical products as a lifestyle instead of the need to remain healthy and use traditional means of patient care to access medical products (Jordanova, 2015). Consequently, the use of social media and mainstream platforms to advance consumerism is geared to reach the highly impressionable population of the majority of young people pursuing ideal body shapes and sizes.
The use of the digital platform to challenge traditional health patterns such as exercise and healthy eating is to give young people a simplified approach to desired body goals which in the long run leads to addiction and dependence on medical products. Mass media images of ideal body features contribute immensely to medical consumerism (Jordanova, 2015). This medical consumerism is primarily driven by a desire to reach a certain body stature that the media glorifies (Parry, 2017). Additionally, the orientation and popular inclination that a certain slender, figured body is ideal for a woman gives society the impression that any woman without such a body figure is disabled or unattractive (Jordanova, 2015). Hence, the media promotion of healthcare consumerism determines this perception.
The result of these addictions and permanent consciousness of one’s body is eating habits that control one’s life and confine one to a certain dependency on pharmaceutical consumerism lifestyles to achieve body ideals. These impossible standards are highly elusive and consistently result in low esteem and high dependency on unhealthy pills and a medical lifestyle (Iliffe & Manthorpe, 2021). Through the addiction to impossible physiques, the victims develop anorexic desires to self-restrict and continuously self-dieting to achieve elusive body shapes (Fries, 2020). As a result, the continuous utility of non-conventional lifestyles leads to permanent addiction to pharmaceutical consumerism and high susceptibility to psychological and physical health challenges.
Conclusion
The healthcare industry has established a distinct international identity in the care industry via the application of innovative and ground-breaking advertising methods. The healthcare business has been able to maintain growth in such a competitive field by promoting its products and services globally to generate goodwill among clients. The healthcare industry relies heavily on strategic social media presence and marketing through customer interactions. When various successful services are celebrated for their positive effects on customers, the healthcare industry gains a positive reputation around the world. To counteract the industry’s risks and weaknesses, the healthcare sector has evolved a vital system of systematizing its strengths and prospects into overall growth and stability with the help of factors like client experiences and distinct tastes.
References
Bastable, S. B., Sopczyk, D., Gramet, P., & Jacobs, K. (2019). Health Professional as Educator: Principles of Teaching and Learning: Principles of Teaching and Learning. Jones & Bartlett Learning. https://www.jblearning.com/catalog/productdetails/9781284230819
Bellieni, C. V. (2019). Healthcare consumerism is a threat to health. Gazzetta Medica Italiana Archivio per Le Scienze Mediche, 178(7-8), 03891-3. https://doi.org/10.23736/S0393-3660.18.03891-3
Fahmi, K., Sihotang, M., Hadinegoro, R. H., Sulastri, E., Cahyono, Y., & Megah, S. I. (2017). Health Care SMEs Products Marketing Strategy: How the Role of Digital Marketing Technology through Social Media? UJoST-Universal Journal of Science and Technology, 1(1), 16-22. https://doi.org/10.11111/ujost.v1i1.55
Fries, C. J. (2020). Healing health care: from sick care towards salutogenic healing systems. Social Theory & Health, 18, 16-32. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41285-019-00103-2
Jordanova, L. (2015). The social construction of medical knowledge. Social History of Medicine, 8(3), 361-381. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/8.3.361
Parry, V. (2017). The art of branding a condition. Medical Marketing andMedia, 38(5), 43–49. https://rws511.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/68702371/Parry_art_branding_condition.pdf
Grębosz-Krawczyk, M., & Olender, M. (2018). The application of mobile marketing in CRM in the medical sector. Handel Wewnętrzny, (3 (374)), 162-171. https://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.desklight-7f6c3190-cbca-4bf0-82b7-c0106c0197cd
Iliffe, S., & Manthorpe, J. (2021). Medical consumerism in the UK, from ‘citizen’s challenge to the ‘managed consumer’—A symbol without meaning? Health Expectations, 24(2), 182–187. https://doi.org/10.1111/hex.13197
Nabi, R. L. (2015). Emotional flow in persuasive health messages. Health communication, 30(2), 114–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2014.974129
Schwartz, L. M., & Woloshin, S. (2019). Medical marketing in the United States, 1997-2016. Jama, 321(1), 80-96. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2720029
Sahlabadi, M., Muniyandi, R. C., Doroudian, N., & Usman, O. L. (2022, February). Impact of Cloud-Based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in Healthcare Sector. In 2022 International Conference on Business Analytics for Technology and Security (ICBATS) (pp. 1-7). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICBATS54253.2022.9758931
U.S Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.). Healthy People 2030: Reduce the proportion of people who misused prescription drugs in the past year – su‑12. https://health.gov/healthypeople/objectives-and-data/browse-objectives/drug-and-alcohol-use/reduce-proportion-people-who-misused-prescription-drugs-past-year-su-12
write