Health care marketing - Essay Example

23 October Health Care Marketing A product is different from a service in many ways.While the product is paid for and acquired once, the service is paid for every month or week depending upon what duration has been established between the vendor and the customer. In some cases, the product’s payment may also range over several months e.g. payment for a car in several installations, but the product can never be taken back by the vendor whereas the service is provided by the vendor as long as the customer keeps paying for it; when the payment stops, the continuation of service delivery is stopped.

The quality of a product does not vary over the course of time. Whatever the quality of the product is, it remains what it was at the time the product was purchased. On the other hand, the quality of a service varies at different points in time e.g. an Internet service that shows high speed generally occasionally becomes slow. Since products are a one-time purchase, they have to be provided guarantee with unlike service, that is purchased just as much as and till the time it is paid for. Therefore, marketing a product requires the vendor to establish a guarantee period for it after which, no claims made by the customer would be entertained.

Marketing a service requires the vendor to provide the guarantee till the time the service is delivered. Vendors have to be more careful while marketing a product because a customer who has bought the product once might never show up for a second buy if the quality was compromising whereas in the case of service, vendors can and actually do sometimes decline the quality of service temporarily because they know that they can upgrade it in case any claims are made.