Social Marketing in the Health Care Industry - Literature review Example

Type the company Social Marketing in the Health Care Industry A Critical assessment Background of the Study: Social marketing utilizes commercial marketing systems to change individual as well as organizational behavior and arrangements. It has been compelling on a populace level over an extensive variety of open health and health awareness spaces. Its role in promoting healthcare has been critical. This paper looks at the literature available for SOCIAL MARKETING IN HEALTHCARE Introduction: Social marketing started as a subject of study in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman contended that the same marketing methods that have been so fruitful in offering items and administrations to purchasers could likewise be utilized to push social ideas, and practices.. Kotler and Andreasen describe social marketing as ‘‘differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organization. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society.’’ (Evans & McCormack, 2008: 1) According to Dr. Chuck Herman (PhD; Missouri State University), commercial marketing can be best described as a “new attitude toward business”, that has made fleeting changes into the industries globally. (Bartels, 1976: Ch. 1 p. 1). However, commercial marketing has not history of application to a social sector (For E.g.; Healthcare) which may influence people to buy. Hence, Social Marketing adopts several principles from commercial marketing and applies them in the social sector. We may distinguish social and commercial marketing as: Social Marketing Commercial Marketing Aims at meeting the needs of the people Profits are shared by society and consumers. Campaigns are aimed at changing behavior (For e.g.; Smoking cessation), hence they take longer and more consumer involvement and commitment is required. Creates needs for people. Manufacturer/marketer makes the profits. Marketing campaigns are short and success is fast, along with little commitment and involvement of the consumer. (CFHC, 2014) Healthcare is the diagnosis, medication, and counteractive action of illness, sickness, damage, and other physical and mental hindrances in people. Healthcare is conveyed by professionals in associated health, dentistry, maternity care obstetrics, drug, nursing, optometry, drug store, psychology and other areas. It alludes to the work done in giving primary care, secondary care, and tertiary care, in addition to public health. According to World Health Organization (2014), “The goal of universal health coverage is to ensure that all people obtain the health services they need without suffering financial hardship when paying for them.” (WHO, 2014). Margaret Chan, the director General of WHO adds that “I regard universal health coverage as the single most powerful concept that public health has to offer. It is inclusive. It unifies services and delivers them in a comprehensive and integrated way, based on primary health care.” (WHO, 2014). REVIEW OF LITERATURE IN SOCIAL MARKETING IN HEALTHCARE: There is restricted proof of the viability of social marketing in changing health care purchaser behavior through its effect on patient-supplier communication or supplier behavior. Social advertisers need to recognize translatable methods (e.g., competition evaluation) that might be connected to health care supplier also customer behavior. 1. Counter Marketing: Three research endeavors from social marketing outline potential techniques to change supplier and purchaser behavior. Counter marketing is a quickly developing social marketing method that has been viable in tobacco control and may be successful in countering pharmaceutical marketing utilizing particular message methods. Educated choice making is a helpful methodology at the point when there is restorative lack of determination, for example, in prostate disease screening and medicine. Pharmaceutical industry marketing practices offer significant lessons for creating contending messages to achieve suppliers and purchasers. Social marketing is a compelling populace based behavior change procedure that might be connected in singular clinical settings and as a supplement to fortify messages imparted on a populace level. There is a need for more research on message procedures that work in health care and populace level viability studies. (Evans & McCormack, 2008: 1-2) 2. Changes in the Healthcare Delivery system: The health care conveyance framework is experiencing critical changes as a consequence of a few late patterns, counting an attention on confirmation based medicine, (Jimison & Sher, 2000) propels in medicinal science and engineering, and open health needs of a maturing populace with expanded commonness of interminable conditions.8 Together, these powers have headed the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to suggest that the health care framework be ""reinvented"" with the objective of encouraging improvement and enhancing health care conveyance. One of the key objectives of the IOMs activity arrangement is to make a framework that is patient centered, significance providing care that is respectful of, and responsive to, individual patient preferences, needs, and values, and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions. (Institute of Medicine, 2001: 3) This objective adjusts well to the new consumerism or activism from patients who are intrigued by being more included in their health and health care. (Jimison & Sher, 2000) The social marketing idea of buyer introduction and requisition of key standards from the field of health correspondence could be utilized to help make a health care framework that advertises persistent centeredness. (Freimuth et al, 2001) At the point when applying standards of social marketing to health care, analysts ought to think about a few subtleties and tests. To begin with, therapeutic learning is unbalanced in that health care suppliers by and large have more information and patients have less; thusly, patients depend on the suppliers to aid them with therapeutic choice making. Nonetheless, correspondence directs have changed significantly in later a long time, expanding patients immediate access to more therapeutic data. Specialists part in mending has changed as they are no more the select wellspring of restorative learning, to a great extent as a consequence of the Internet. (Blumenthal, 2002: 531) Second, and likewise identified with innovative headways, social advertisers are presently confronted with tests, for example, builds in the number and kind of health issues seeking people in generals consideration, critical limits on individuals chance, and an expansion in the number and sort of correspondence channels. (Backer et al, 1992) 3. New Innovations: New media and new innovations, for example, handheld gadgets make an environment in which shoppers and health care suppliers can accept health messages—and messages that may support unhealthy behavior at any time and in any place. (Lefebvre, 2007) Choosing the right setting, channels and messages that will inspire individuals to give careful consideration and utilize the health data are around the best health correspondence and social marketing tests. Third, the presence of health protection, especially far reaching first-dollar scope, evacuates or limits the immediate monetary load on health care shoppers. Buyers can buy an item a therapeutic methodology fetching many dollars—for a little divide of the expense on the off chance that it is secured by their protection. Consequently, their center is as all the more on the profit they will accept from the item whats more conceivable physical and psychosocial ""expenses"" connected with it, instead of money related expenses. This interesting feature of health care items ought to be mulled over when passing on data to buyers. Specialists can utilize the social marketing wheel to address some of these tests when applying social marketing to health care. (Evans & McCormack, 2008: 3) 4. Interactive Approach in Social Marketing: Contemporary health promotion includes more than essentially instructing people about healthy practices. It incorporates deliberations to change hierarchical conduct, and additionally the physical and social environment of groups. (National Institutes of Health, 2005) It is additionally about creating and upholding for arrangements that help health, for example, investment impetuses. Health promotion programs that try to address health issues over this range utilize an extent of systems, and work on different levels. (National Institutes of Health, 2005) The biological viewpoint accentuates the collaboration between, and reliance of, variables inside and over all levels of a health issue. It highlights individuals connections with their physical and socio cultural situations. (National Institutes of Health, 2005) Two key ideas of the natural point of view help to distinguish intercession focuses for pushing health: initially, conduct both influences, and is influenced by, various levels of impact; second, singular conduct both shapes, and is formed by, the natures domain (corresponding causation). (National Institutes of Health, 2005: 10) 5. Development of Social Marketing: Social marketing advanced in parallel with business marketing. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, marketing scholastics acknowledged the potential and restrictions of applying marketing to new enclosures, (for example, political or social). (MacFadyen et al, 1999: 1-2)Case in point, in 1951, Wiebe posed the question, "Can fellowship be sold like cleanser?", and proposed that the more a social change fight emulated that of a business marketing fight, the more stupendous the probability of its prosperity. (MacFadyen et al, 1999: 2) To a lot of people, nonetheless, the thought of extending the requisition of marketing to social reasons was detestable. Luck (1974) protested because reinstating a substantial item with a thought or heap of qualities debilitated the budgetary trade idea. Others dreaded the force of the marketing, confusing its potential for social control and publicity (Laczniak et al, 1979: 32). In spite of these concerns, the marketing idea was redefined to incorporate the marketing of thoughts and the attention of its moral suggestions. The extension of the marketing idea joined with a movement in broad daylight health strategy towards malady aversion started to prepare for the improvement of social marketing. Throughout the 1960s, business marketing innovations started to be connected to health instruction crusades in creating nations (Ling et al 1992, Manoff 1985). In 1971, Kotler and Zaltman distributed their original article in the Journal of Marketing Social marketing: a methodology to arranged social change. This was the first time the expression "social marketing" had been utilized and is frequently proclaimed as its introduction to the world. They characterized social marketing as "the configuration, usage and control of projects computed to impact the agreeableness of social plans and including contemplations of item arranging, evaluating, correspondence, conveyance and marketing examination." (p5). In practice, social marketing was being investigated by various individuals at the same time, including Paul Bloom, Karen Fox, Dick Manoff, and Bill Novelli. Early samples of social marketing rose throughout the 1960s as a feature of universal improvement deliberations in third world and creating nations. For instance, family arranging projects in Sri Lanka moved far from clinical methodologies and analyzed the conveyance of contraceptives through drug specialists and little shops (Population Services International 1977). They started to explore different avenues regarding marketing strategies, for example, group of onlookers division and mass correspondence. Essentially, oral rehydration ventures in Africa started to take a more shopper turned methodology to program advancement. Essential activities in the created world incorporated the Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program, the National High Blood Pressure Prevention Program, and the Pawtucket Heart Health Program (Farquar et al 1985, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute 1973, Lefebvre 1987). While huge numbers of these early projects were essential activities in social interchanges, they were paramount for the commencement of social marketing. By the 1980s, scholastics were no more inquiring as to whether marketing ought to be connected to social issues, but instead by what means ought to this be carried out? Throughout this period, professionals imparted their encounters and made proposals for the improvement of social marketing hypothesis and work on (Ling et al 1992). Fox and Kotler (1980) depicted the development of social promoting into social interchanges. Sprout (1980) investigated the assessment of social marketing tasks and found that numerous studies were inadequately composed and directed. In 1981, Bloom and Novelli surveyed the initial ten years of social marketing and supported more research to disperse feedback that social marketing needed thoroughness or hypothesis. They distinguished a need for examination to look at crowd division, picking media channels and outlining offers, executing long term situating methodologies, and hierarchical and administration issues. 6. Social Marketing Wheel: "Social Marketing Wheel" idea is excerpted from the U.S. National Cancer Institutes (NCI) persuasive "Pink Book" for health communication planning. There are 6 fundamental stages: 1. Planning and strategy development using behavioral theory; (National Institutes of Health, 2005) 2. Selecting communication channels and materials: taking into account conduct change goals and learning of the intended interest group (e.g., utilizing surviving information on customer health status or conduct); (National Institutes of Health, 2005) 3. Developing and pretesting of materials: utilizing qualitative routines (e.g., center gathering testing of potential health messages); (National Institutes of Health, 2005) 4. Implementing the communication program or “campaign”: (e.g., a mass media campaign, or an arranged system of one-on-one correspondence about preventive conduct by a health care professional); (National Institutes of Health, 2005) 5. Assessing effectiveness in terms of audience exposure, awareness, reactions to messages and behavioral outcomes: (e.g., assessment scrutinize on degree of enhanced eating regimen or proceeded non-smoking status); (National Institutes of Health, 2005) and 6. Refining the materials for future communications. (National Institutes of Health, 2005) The stages constitute a round methodology in which the last stage nourishes go into the first to make a persistent circle of arranging, usage and change. Ideas underlying the "Social Marketing Wheel" offer open doors to health plans, health care professionals and shoppers. For instance, health care suppliers have generous data about their patients. 7. Effectiveness of Social Marketing: Despite the fact that numerous essential studies asserting to assess the adequacy of singular social marketing projects have been directed, there have been just a little number of surveys of its viability all in all as a health conduct change approach. Case in point, a later audit of the adequacy of social marketing mediations intended to advertise condom use around "poor and powerless" gatherings found that, in spite of the fact that the projects were battling to achieve the poorest gatherings, they had attained a few accomplishment in tending to social whats more administrative obligations to get to. An alternate audit, of social marketing sustenance and physical action mediations, found that, in spite of the fact that social marketing had been compelling in modifying a few practices; its general impacts were restricted. Be that as it may, these surveys have various impediments. Strategies have not generally been efficient, and there is frequently lacking data on the inquiry method and incorporation criteria. Specifically, surveys frequently neglect to state expressly how social marketing mediations have been characterized, and conceptualize social marketing in generally varying ways. For example, in family oriented surveys social marketing is frequently taken to mean, fundamentally, the free dispersion of condoms. In others, social marketing is confused as basically social promoting or correspondences. (Ross et al, 2007: 113-114). However, some previous studies in the field of social marketing have concluded that “enhancing knowledge and creating supportive attitudes often has little or no impact upon behavior” (McKenzie-Mohr, 2000: 544) Summary: Instructed decision making is a useful procedure exactly when there is remedial absence of determination, for instance, in prostate malady screening and solution. However, Correspondence controls have changed essentially in later quite a while, extending patients quick get to more restorative information. New media and new advancements, for instance, handheld devices make an environment in which customers and health care suppliers can acknowledge health messages-and messages that may help unhealthy conduct at whatever time and in wherever. Picking the right setting, channels and messages that will rouse people to give careful thought and use the health information are around the best health correspondence and social marketing tests. Third, the vicinity of health assurance, particularly extensive first-dollar extension, clears or limits the quick fiscal load on health care customers. Purchasers can purchase a thing a restorative system getting numerous dollars-for a little separation of the cost if, despite everything that it is secured by their insurance. Their core is as more on the benefit they will acknowledge from the thing additionally possible physical and psychosocial "Costs" joined with it, rather than cash related costs. This intriguing characteristic of health care things should be considered when passing on information to purchasers. Authorities can use the social marketing wheel to address some of these tests when applying social marketing to health care. Contemporary health promotion incorporates more than basically teaching individuals about healthy practices. It fuses considerations to change various leveled behavior, and also the physical and social environment of gatherings. It is also about making and maintaining for plans that help health, for instance, venture driving forces. Health promotion programs that attempt to address health issues over this reach use a degree of frameworks, and deal with distinctive levels. The organic perspective accents the cooperation between, and dependence of, variables inside and over all levels of a health issue. It highlights peoples associations with their physical and social circumstances. Two key thoughts of the common perspective help to recognize intervention centers for pushing health: at first, direct both impacts, and is affected by, different levels of effect; second, peculiar behavior both shapes, and is structured by, the natures space. "Social Marketing Wheel" comprises of Planning and strategy development using behavioral theory, Selecting communication channels and materials: taking into account conduct change goals and learning of the intended interest group, Developing and pretesting of materials: utilizing qualitative routines, Implementing the communication program or ‘campaign’, Assessing effectiveness in terms of audience exposure, awareness, reactions to messages and behavioral outcomes, and Refining the materials for future communications. References: Backer et al (1992) Designing Health Communication Campaigns: What Works?, Sage. Bartels, R. (1976) The History of Marketing Thought, 2nd edition, Minnesota: Grid [inc.]. Blumenthal (2002) Doctors in a wired world: can professionalism survive connectivity?, Milbank Q., vol. 80, pp. 524-546. CFHC (2014) What is Social Marketing; California Family Health Council (CFHC), [Online], Available: https://www.stdhivtraining.org/YSMT_socmarketing.html [25 April 2014]. Evans & McCormack (2008) Applying Social Marketing in Health Care: Communicating Evidence to Change Consumer Behavior, Society for Medical Decision Making, p. 12. Freimuth et al (2001) Issues in evaluating mass media health communication campaigns, in al, R.e. Evaluation in Health Promotion: Principles and Perspectives, 92nd edition, Geneva: WHO Regional Publications, European Series. Institute of Medicine (2001) Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, National Academy Press. Jimison & Sher (2000), in Chapman & Sonnenberg Advances in presenting health information to patients in decision making in health care: theory psychology and applications., Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Laczniak et al (1979) Social marketing: Its ethical dimensions, Journal of Marketing, vol. 43, Spring, pp. 29-36. Lefebvre (2007) Social marketing and the new age of media, 11th Annual Innovations in Social Marketing Conference, Baltimore. MacFadyen et al (1999) A Synopsis of Social Marketing, p. 10. McKenzie-Mohr, D. (2000) Promoting Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing, The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, pp. 543-553. National Institutes of Health (2005) A Guide For Health Promotion Practice, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, Spring, p. 64. Ross et al (2007) A systematic review of social marketing effectiveness, Health Education, vol. 107, no. 2, pp. 126–191. WHO (2014) What is Universal health coverage; World Health Organization, [Online], Available: http://www.who.int/features/qa/universal_health_coverage/en/ [25 April 2014]. Read More