mommyjenlin

Why do we need marketing? I can see it now, CFOs and other senior managers in hospitals and health systems around the country going … “Tell me again…why do we need marketing? After all by 2014, millions of uninsured will be insured. Sure we face reimbursement cuts, but we can weather that” and the conversation goes on…… Marketing will be more important than ever! As we enter the brave new world of healthcare reform, several significant events will take place over the coming couple of years for which most healthcare organizations are not prepared for: Transparency Bundling Value purchasing Demand management Consumer choice What will be required is a refinement of marketing strategies, tactics, integrated messaging and excellence in execution for the brave new healthcare world. Marketing needs to be closely aligned with the organizational strategic, business development and financial plans The new marketing environment. Competition is not going by the wayside. It will only increase a...

Twenty percent of tech vendors $1b or greater in revenue are now reporting that they have experienced some form of organizational "mash-up" between marketing and sales over the last 12 months. This is the C-level effort to adddress the long-standing mis-alignments and costly points-of-friction between sales and marketing. Lots of thoughts on this...but the most important is a "heads-up" to expect more organizational pressure and change in 2010. IDC forecasts marketing expenses (investment) to rise by 3.5% this year. We expect sales expenses (investment) to rise by 4.7%. Finally, we expect average revenue to to rise by 3.2 %. So, the math is not hard: operating margins will be under continued pressure. My sense is that the C-Level will respond with more brute force re-drawing of organization charts.

I have just returned from the Bay Area where last week I moderated a panel of senior marketers on the topic of Social Media within the complex B2B marketing mix. The more I think through the potential for this area, the more excited I become about the contributions that Social Media will eventually make to marketing. What is most promising is that "Social” will help to transform marketing communications into what it should be: a two-way interaction between buyer and seller. Presently, much of our marketing communications is just the opposite: a one-way push of the vendor’s voice. But Social Media is not Marketing…Yet. Mostly, it’s a jumbled mass of dialogue with a lot of static to sort through. Social Media will become marketing when two things happen. First it needs to contribute to the "inbound" side of marketing. Web 2.0 conversations about your company’s product and services need to be mined and gleaned so that they become valuable components of your product mana...

What is experience mapping? This is a marketing analytic technique that allows you to identify the communication channels and categories of service that individuals move though in a relationship building process. It allows you to more fully understand visually the relationship, and messaging opportunities. Created originally by the Boston Consulting Group for retail shoppers, I have taken the concepts and applied to healthcare. This analysis can be used for any audience or service-line. For our purposes today, here is a simplified version of a patient experience map. First create a chart that contains 5 columns or more and three rows. Each column is a different chevron and each row contains different information. Touch points can be in multiple columns. What an experience map looks like: The Patient Experience First column first row box: Relationship I initiation First column second row box: Patient is exposed t o hospital information First column third row box: Referral Touch Points :...