Wednesday, 15 December 2010 16:16
A successful marketing strategy begins with understanding the context, finding out what customers want, and what value they attach to ‘it’. It works to understand which customers are more likely to want or need a product or service, where to reach them, and how to communicate a consistent message to them. If carried out well, a good marketing strategy aligns a service or a product with its potential users’ needs, bringing both clarity and insight to a provider organisation.
Facing up to the challenge
In a nutshell, marketing is a discipline that uses ‘insight’ to inform decisions and help organisations focus on the most important factor: their customers and what they want. Yet when it comes to the NHS, marketing is often dismissed as an unnecessary evil, on a par with the word ‘profit’ which it seeks to generate. Both are seen as a contradiction, at odds with the ethos of an organisation that provides services that are accessible to all and free at the point of need. But does this view miss an opportunity to better understand a complex and changing environment?
Today’s NHS faces a multitude of challenges: on one hand, the reform agenda is shifting the balance of power to patients, allowing choice and competition to guide innovation and shape services. On the other, economic pressure is bearing down on public services to make savings, use resources more efficiently, and do more for less. The need to sustain services in the future, in the face of an aging population that will drive the need for health services up, only compounds the issue.
How can marketing help?
Adopting a marketing approach could help NHS organisations take a closer look at patients and their needs and find a more collaborative approach to meeting them. It could help reduce waste and duplication, empower patients, and drive economies of scale. It could also encourage better use of technology and innovation.
What can we do?
Within the limits of shrinking resources, it would help to take a portfolio approach to services, so that those that are performing well can help subsidise those that are needed but aren’t cost effective. The savings, surplus or profit (whichever term you might be more inclined to use), generated this way would help to fund new services and cater for a growing patient population.
What could be better for the patient? The question should really be not why the NHS needs marketing but ‘how quickly can we learn how to do it right’?