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Nashville Market Researchers Explain the Value of Data Gathering

When people not in the marketing business are asked to define the word "marketing," most respond with answers related to advertising.

Yet advertising may be just the final step in a comprehensive strategy to measure customer loyalty, define potential customers, identify the viability of new products or service lines, determine community attitudes and gauge the effectiveness of existing advertisements and other communication. That process underlines the necessity of market research, which can be crucial to the bottom line of today's healthcare providers.

"The advertising portion of a hospital's marketing plan is the last 15 percent of the work. So 85 percent of the effort really comes in with planning, development, secondary research and primary research," said Jim Toth, president of Edge Healthcare Research, a Nashville firm with a 22-year history of market research related specifically to healthcare providers. Toth explained that secondary research is the culling of relevant information from existing sources, while primary research – which is what Edge does – employs methodologies such as surveys, focus groups and personal interviews.

Dan Prince, president of Nashville-based Catalyst Healthcare Research, said that as patients increasingly approach the acquisition of their healthcare as active consumers, provider knowledge of the market is paramount. "Consumer marketing techniques and marketing-research techniques have a greater relevance today to what hospitals and clinics are doing and must do to attract those consumers and gain their allegiance," he said. Catalyst is a spinoff of Prince Market Research, founded in 1974.

Prince described a market-research project for a Tennessee hospital looking to increase patient numbers for its top-notch birthing center and neonatal intensive care unit. While hospital leaders, of course, knew that the general demographic was women of childbearing years, how best to reach those women with an effective message was the research goal.

First, Catalyst used a conventional telephone survey. "You continue to just do a deep dive into the consumer populations … to understand exactly who those consumers are in terms of their attitudes and behaviors," he said. Then the firm identified some candidates for focus groups, testing advertisements for images and message. "As a result of that, the hospital was able to run a very cost-effective advertising campaign that pulled in exactly the profile they were seeking," he said.

While focus groups may provide valuable input, are former and potential patients really interested in participating? "People are motivated to provide feedback," Prince said. "If you give them a relatively easy way to do that and treat them with respect and really listen to what they have to say, we've found that consumers are very willing to provide very rich feedback."

Market research differs drastically, depending on whether a provider is working to build a brand or build brand loyalty. What's more, most hospitals are building brands by service lines these days. A hospital brand "goes beyond just hospital awareness," Toth said. Yet to build a brand, you need to know how the brand is already identified by consumers. "Community perception may be a lot different than what you think," he said. Research on the front end, he noted, ensures that providers are approaching image-building by taking into account consumers' existing perceptions. Otherwise, it's a shot in the dark.

To further make the case, according to research by Nashville-based HealthStream, "It's not enough to implement branding initiatives –– you've got to measure, evaluate and adjust constantly."

As opposed to branding, loyalty is a different animal, presuming a prior relationship between the provider and the patient. Therefore, gauging patient satisfaction is a must. "In today's environment, I would say that gathering basic patient-satisfaction feedback is absolutely necessary, but it's not sufficient," Prince said. "It's a foundation for understanding on a basic level how we deliver the core elements of customer service that patients expect, but it probably doesn't go deep enough in many cases to understand how different segments view that experience or how that experience could be improved."

Toth said Edge approaches loyalty research by first surveying an entire market area to gauge satisfaction and gather other information from former patients of the client and its competitors. "We then create loyalty functions and define the client's and other hospitals' patient loyalty as loyal, tentative, at-risk or alienated. A summary score then puts it all in perspective and ranks the loyalty for each hospital. We then define the factors that account for the at-risk and alienation levels for each hospital. That way the hospital client has the specific reasons for each of these," he said. That makes designing a competitive strategy easier.

Both Toth and Prince noted that, ultimately, healthcare market research measures actual and perceived quality of care, a distinction ever more critical in the modern consumer-driven healthcare arena.

"Increasingly, consumers want to be a partner in their own care," Prince said, and that's why providers "are trying harder and harder to create a personalized experience where they can really connect the consumer they're after to their brand in ways that are relevant and memorable."

He pointed to the famed Mayo Clinic as an example. "They make that experience so personalized and so rich and so rewarding that Mayo has the benefit of ambassadors for their brand, who are evangelists who go out and tell the story of how great Mayo Clinic is," he said.

One final thought: Toth said research by Edge has determine that U.S. consumers make the choice of a hospital about half the time, and physicians make the choice the other half of the time. Therefore, it's certainly necessary to reach consumers in an increasingly targeted way, yet it's also important that reaching physicians –– and building a relationship with them –– should be part of a hospital's marketing strategy as well.


www.catalysthealthcareresearch.com • www.edgehcr.com

Tags:

Catalyst Healthcare Research, Dan Prince, Edge Healthcare Research, Healthcare market research, hospital branding, Jim Toth

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