Recent marketing literature suggests that brand orientation is an alternative concept for the public health because it is believed to address the shortcomings of market orientation. Brand orientation is specifically of interest to the sector of healthcare, due to the complex nature of the sector. The purpose of the study described in this paper was to find out what the possibilities are of brand orientation for local healthcare providers. The study shows that brand orientation is relevant for physical therapy primary healthcare organizations (PTPHOs), but is not always adopted effectively. PTPHOs are strongly focused on the patient as the only stakeholder. A more powerful option would be to choose a brand positioning strategy for all relevant stakeholders. PTPHOs have to design integrated marketing activities to encourage consumers directly to use our products/services, and to encourage suppliers, distributors, and other key stakeholders to promote our products/services to consumers. In order to safeguard their role and position in the context of community care for the future, the PTPHO is challenged to become more active and more visible, and must collaborate more with other (healthcare) professionals in the community, broaden their services, and focus more on the (future) needs of the citizen.
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he reorientation of the public sector along market lines has led to the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM): the assumption that the public sector can be improved by management principles and techniques traditionally associated with the private sector. However, market orientation has also become associated with a number of problems, particularly in the public sector. Recent literature suggests that brand orientation can serve as an alternative to market orientation. Our chapter reviews the concept of brand orientation in the healthcare sector, the extent to which Dutch hospitals are currently managed as brands and the key issues in implementing brand management principles in Dutch hospitals.
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Consumers currently place increasing importance on the values that companies represent. Modern values such as transparency, benevolence to society, sustainability and fairness are becoming more relevant, as noted by many major consulting firms among which are Nielsen (2013), the World Federation of Advertisers (2013) and the Boston Consultancy Group (2013). Modern values are grounded in social, political and economic developments and represent the new values of this era. As a consequence, a company’s value to consumers no longer has to lie solely in its products and services. This new, broader scope of value may include the entire business process and organizational culture, ranging from the management’s integrity to values being found in the company’s contributions to society. Although the role of values in human behaviour has been extensively discussed in the psychology literature since the beginning of the 1900s (e.g. Feather 1995; Hofstede 1980; Olson and Maio 2003; Rokeach 1973; Schwartz 2012), limited attention has been dedicated to values in marketing literature. This was the conclusion of a systematic literature review that we conducted on this subject (Voorn et al. 2016). As a follow-up, we organized an online survey (n = 1109) to empirically investigate the role of values in the brand selection process. In this paper, we report on the relationship between values and brand purchase intentions through the concept of value congruence and in relation to several product categories representing services, durables and consumables. Overall, the results confirm the relevance of value congruence as a predictor of brand purchase, in particular in services and durables. Our study shows that companies can benefit from incorporating values into their marketing strategies, especially those values that are congruent with (higher-order) personal goals, rather than more (instrumental) category-specific values. This offers new marketing perspectives, especially for brands. Brands are – by definition – more than just one product or service, which means they can serve as an umbrella for the incorporation and propagation of new values. However, an important question remains for the brand manager: the extent to which values have an advantage over brand personality traits and functional attributes, since investing in values is not only about communication – it means that an organization needs to embody them in the very fibre of its being; otherwise it may be perceived as ‘green washing’, which can undermine brand trust.
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