Social Media Marketing Developments in Private Hospitals in Bangkok

摘要

Purpose: This is a research paper focused on assessing private hospital marketing manager’s perceptions of social media issues relating to private hospitals in Bangkok.Methodology: In order to consider more implicitly the questions and issues raised, this empirical groundwork utilised an interpretive perspective. The scope for this research was the Marketing Managers/Directors of a wide range of private hospitals situated in Bangkok, Thailand. The population for this study was made up of a number of individual (21) managers located at one main-site, and a total of 13 Managers/Directors were determined as the resultant sample frame.Findings: The outcomes consisted of five (5) main themes, namely: Marketing Issues; Social Media Technology Issues; Communication Issues; Cost Issues; and Security Issues; and 14 sub-themes raised from an initial question.Practical Implications: The paper gives a clear insight into the practical issues surrounding a hospital setting and the development of appropriate marketing strategies in relation to social media engagement and developments were illuminated. The paper suggests that developments of this kind may benefit from a greater use of security management, whilst outlying the issues of significant costs concerns, and the effects on communication developments and marketing opportunities through contemporary technology in the form of a seamless and an integrated ICT system between the hospital management, patient and other stakeholders.Originality: Very little research has been conducted in this area in Bangkok and the paper exposes weak aspects of communications marketing capability through technology previously unexplored in today’s private hospital environments. Introduction All hospitals have marketing programmes, but some exhibit more developed targeting practices (Hornik, 2002) than others as an essential marketing focus in today’s modern social marketing practices (Kotler, 1997). Private hospitals appeal to those in society who can afford and want to make choices about their health provision and can personally pay for health assessment and treatment (Berendes, et al., 2011). Marketing to patients in the long-term makes sound business sense (Kalwani and Narayandas, 1995), as the spend increases/patient as the relationships deepens (Gould, 1988). This is because private hospitals provide more flexibility in their offering (Reynolds, et al., 2013), can provide “as demanded” services at any time (Bender et al., 1990), targeted to different patient groups (Nguyen, 2011) and can offer more levels of quality provision defining trust and commitment (Morgan and Hunt, 1994). Thus, by definition private hospitals provide more of a personal service to an individual’s health care (Wilson, Whitaker and Whitford, 2012; Ozawa and Walker, 2011) than in the often freely available or less cost government sector. Private hospitals tend to spend more on marketing practices (Cutler and Morton, 2013) than their government-funded counterparts and especially on ICT technologies linking to the patient (Lindberg, et al., 2013; Abaidooand Larweh, 2014). As an extension of this, these marketing practices appear to be embraced in multi-channels (Mittelstaedt, Duke and Mittelstaedthave, 2009) evolved to include social media use (Heldman, Schindelar and Weaver, 2013) as an important application of mobile technologies, which have become widely accepted (Hawn, 2009) especially among the richer elements of society (Balaban and Marano, 2010).Social media appears to have the potential for improving marketing productivity and potency (Sheth and Parvatiyar, 1995) but little has been published in this area (Neiger et al., 2012). For example, one study indicated that 99% of doctors utilise social media for personal use, but only 65% for professional use (Househ, 2013). Social media is a more personable and flexible way of interacting with patients by engaging in immediate electronic communication (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010) whil