Be Well Hospitals - a multi-specialty secondary healthcare chain of hospitals is set up in the

suburbs, industrial towns and district headquarters of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The
hospital chain co-founded by Dr. C.J.Vetrievel in 2011, fulfills the need of quality healthcare services
in secondary healthcare market segment. They provide access to high-quality primary and secondary
healthcare services at affordable price to the semi-urban and rural population through their chain of
multi-specialty hospitals. In the four and half years, since its founding, Be Well has set up eight
hospitals with a combined capacity of more than 280 beds and has treated close to 500,000 patients.
The case describes Be Well's operations and the marketing initiatives it deployed to increase the
adoption of its service concept in a two -tiered market. it provides information about the content of
Be Well's past advertising communications and the media choices it made to build its brand. The
management is grappling with the dilemma of brand building and educating potential customers
about the high quality of care available at Be Well in a format that had a smaller footprint than its
big city rivals. A complicating factor is creating a three-tier market with the limited resources in a
setting where the customers are used to a two-tier service structure. They face a resource allocation
challenge with regard to the mix of media-based and non-media based communication platforms.
The management needs to decided on the choice of service attributes or dimensions around which
the Be Well brand to be built and whether to focus on local branding of each hospital or develop a
unified and common brand across all its facilities in the state.
The branding challenge posed to Be Well was unique in the sense that the firm had to create a new
market structure, rather than aiming to work with the existing structure. The current system in the
health care sector consists of two recognised tiers: the renowned brands offering high quality
services at high prices, and the small clinics and nursing homes with low pricing and easier access
but possible degradation in quality. Be Well created for itself a third tier, aiming to combine quality
with optimal pricing.

Be Well dealt with this challenge by branding itself as a mid-tier organisation. In the Indian context,
this is particularly difficult to execute, since the customer segment of health care is fixated with the
idea that only big, famous brands are reliable. Be Well as such has established itself as a mid-tier
brand offering accessible health care at lower prices than those of bigger brands, reinforced with the
quality smaller clinics cannot provide.

It is important to observe how Be Well has proven its mettle in the fiercely competitive service
sector, where a firm has to prove at every point that it deserves the mid-tier. Setting up a service
brand as well as their own clinical operations and thus solving the branding challenge—all of this
makes the Be Well case truly worth studying.

the Be Well case demonstrates, through an individual who has previously devoted a fair amount of
time to big concerns such as Apollo Hospitals, that standardised health care is indeed possible with
appropriate implementation.

Something else that sets Be Well apart from other mid-tier health care providers is the centralised
system of recruitment and the management’s inclusive treatment of staff. Be Well has focused on
the goals and aspirations of the doctors, medical superintendents, consultants and other staff
employed, and hence aligned these key players with the organisation’s overall mission.