SELLING HEALTH CARE SERVICES: A STATE-OF-THE-ART REVIEW ON HOSPITAL MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS AND BRANDING

摘要

Around the world health care marketers face similar challenges, but very different operating environments in terms of liberalization, regulation, patient autonomy and market maturity. This heterogeneity constitutes a major obstacle for research on integrated marketing communication strategies for hospitals. After marketing became accepted in the health care context, today's questions are how to create, develop, execute and measure successful hospital marketing communications (BMC). So far little is known about HMC's effectiveness and the demand for convenient ways to measure its results grows. Based on a systematic literature review and further qualitative content analysis, the aim of this study is threefold: First, we sum up the state-of-the-art on HMC and hospital branding. Second, we develop recommendations on messaging content and channel usage for hospitals. Third, we identify white spots in scholarly research to drive the scientific advancement of HMC.