What Ails Healthcare Marketing: The reasons why marketing fails to make a prominent impact in most healthcare business units, is glaring at our faces.

How do I get new patients and how do I retain them? This question troubles almost all the marketing heads in the Industry. It is a no brainer that many of the players in the industry are lagging behind when it comes to marketing themselves in today’s age of digitization. So what are the issues faced by healthcare marketing sector?

·        Changing consumer behavior: Traditional mindset believes consumer can’t really compare the product so what they trust is the word of mouth coming from a trusted source, which could be a family physician, a friend, a neighbor or a colleague at office.

With the advent of social media, and penetration of internet services, the consumer is more informed and the organization’s reputation spreads faster (even faster if it is negative). So, you have a mixed consumer pattern, on one hand your customer listens to her family physician and on the other side, she is gingerly in making a choice. So, both sales and PR are required to gain the confidence of this customer.

·        Payer? Influencer? Patient? : Unlike the west, where after getting tie ups with a couple of insurance companies, marketing department can shift their focus to branding and product side, in India it is still a retail sales business. We have all the permutations and combinations of the payer and influencer available in our country. The day to day challenge for the marketing team is how I get footfalls on the next day, which makes it more of a firefighting than a planned coordinated effort. Invariably, the result of such an activity is not up to the mark.

·        Commission!!! : Ok so you call it commission, or a cut, or a referral fee, or whatever glorified name you give to it, it still remains a big menace for the marketer. I shall like to keep my opinion reserved on the legal and ethical aspects of it, but all that I shall be pointing out here is that you cannot neglect its presence in the market. Even though you may not be indulging in it, but it does make your work difficult, as you need to compete against your counterparts who do decide to offer commissions. So, as a marketer, you need to take a call whether to communicate value or to communicate value (monetary)!!!

Disruptors like practos and others coming into picture, may empower the consumer with knowledge about the options available and their ratings (still a subjective rating, not an objective one), shall definitely lead to a shift away from this practice.

·        Consumer distrust: With all the “satyamev jayates” of the world turning their attention to medical malpractices there is a growing distrust in the minds of the consumer towards healthcare services, be it a hospital or a laboratory or a pharmaceutical company. In this hostile environment of growing distrust, establishing and communicating your brand value becomes a really uphill task.

·        Competitive forces and scarcity of trained manpower: As with any industry, the competition is huge in healthcare. There are a few dominant players, and then there are others vying for the “top of the mind” slot. With the industry being so fragmented, and the offerings being so diversified, it is a real tough market out there. To complicate matters further, the competition that you face is not just from within the industry, but also from those outside, which includes the yoga gurus claiming to heal just about anything and the know-it-all quacks and the next door “chemists” (pharmacists).

The sector being a niche one and the techniques employed being unique to it, it becomes really hard to get sufficient professionally trained people. There are a few bridging courses available, but the problem with these courses is that they still don’t cater to the practical nuances faced in the field, and the price point at which they are offered restricts the penetration.

·        Data collection and usage: When the entire world is shifting their focus to big data and analytics, healthcare is yet to utilize any data for the purpose of formulating a marketing plan or developing a product. Obviously, we lack the usage of BA & BI tools because of lack of data. Hospitals have started moving towards data collection, but the motivation for and the usage of that also remains mostly for billing & accounting purpose. The situation is not expected to change much, as the balance of supply demand dynamics seems to be biased towards the providers and hence the motivation for using the data is not really there.

·        Getting the right mix of strategy: The four pillars of healthcare marketing can be described as retail sales, corporate sales, branding & PR, and research. Most of the hospitals are only limiting their efforts towards the first two of these. PR seems to be the upcoming thing, but its strength is still underutilized in the market. Getting the perfect combination of the four is still far from what we see.

(I had originally written this article for a magazine HealthBiz Insights)