Everything is marketing, especially the “process” stuff

Yesterday, the groundwork was laid on the importance of the process elements of a hospital visit.  Patients, when evaluating their satisfaction with a hospital visit, evaluate the service (interactions with providers and staff, satisfaction with hospital food, etc.).  They don’t judge the health outcome of their stay.  It makes a whole lot of sense because patients know good service; they’re less likely to know the right way to feel at discharge, unless the outcome is awful.  They evaluate within a familiar frame.

That creates opportunity for health care.  Here it is, From the Head of Zeus Jones:

we like to think that the best marketing ideas are actually company operations that happen to be really appealing or compelling to customers too. One of the many advantages of this line of thought is that marketing is completely integrated into the business and you don’t have to spend money to build marketing programs that then build your business, you simply spend money on building your business.

Integrated marketing allows proper focus on the “process” stuff.  Spend “marketing” money on improving those elements instead of television commercials pushing the brand.  The process is where the (good) (and bad) stories happen and the stories are where the brand is genuinely pushed. Given the power, story works.

Traditional health care marketing is not marketing.  Integrating “marketing” into every operational activity is.

Need ideas?  There are several here.

(link via influx insights)