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Defining Products in Healthcare Organizations

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Defining Products in Healthcare Organizations

Product marketing involves defining key attributes, such as features, functions, and

benefits of goods or services in the market. Precisely, product marketing is the main driving

force behind launching and positioning products in the market (Catana, & Toma, 2021). Thus,

product marketers are masterminds of messaging, facilitators of sales, and accelerators of the

adoption of products in the market. In healthcare, marketers need to conceptualize products

offered by healthcare organizations in order to promote them effectively. However, healthcare

organizations struggled and seemed unconcerned about clearly defining their products in the

past.

Healthcare organizations were unconcerned about defining their products based on how

they conceptualized health. The healthcare product was often defined as a service rather than a

marketable product. That is, healthcare product was not exchangeable between consumers in the

market setting. The conceptualization of healthcare products as services affected how

organizations determined the specifications for product characteristics, packaging, and pricing

(Aagaard, 2020). As a result, it was cumbersome conducting research to help in segmenting the

markets, promoting, and pricing the products. Thus, the healthcare organizations were not more

concerned about clearly defining the products due to their provision as services.

In the past, healthcare organizations faced challenges in defining their products due to the

lack of proper regulatory mechanisms in the market to enable them to disclose the pricing

strategies and targeted customer segments. The lack of regulatory mechanisms in the market

resulted in an imbalanced trading environment for healthcare products. Thus, the organizations

encountered challenges in differentiating their product offerings from competitors. Besides, the

lack of market regulations impacted regular identification of personas to ensure product

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positioning and messaging of health products. This made it impossible to create tailored images

of healthcare products for specific customers. Therefore, healthcare organizations were

unconcerned about defining their products to avoid disclosing their key marketing attributes that

would be easily manipulated by competitors.

Most organizations in the past capitalized on the absence of effective financial accounting

systems to generate more profits. Also, there were no efficient payment structures for conducting

business transactions. These weaknesses opened room for the application of unethical means and

suggested methods of fetching higher profits without necessarily naming the healthcare products.

By clearly defining product prices, the healthcare organizations would be forced to comply with

market standards of disclosing product costs to match those of similar health care providers. As a

result, healthcare organizations were unconcerned about defining their products since it would

negatively impact the amount of revenue collected from the business.

The health sector is a business that lacks a specific targeted audience. Thus, the lack of

clarity on the target audience makes it difficult to determine the right channels for distributing

products in the market (Aagaard, 2020). With the inability to clearly define the target audience,

healthcare organizations had no significant reason for specifying their products to attract more

customers. Therefore, there was no need of defining products in the healthcare industry as a way

of improving product marketing.

Another reason that could have prompted healthcare organizations to avoid defining

products encompasses the wider scope related to health conditions. Healthcare organizations

address diverse health conditions with no clear specifications on the expected patient needs.

Accordingly, a lot of uncertainties concerning the illnesses and outcomes of medical services

influenced the failure of product definitions by healthcare organizations. Therefore, it was not
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easy for healthcare organizations to understand the distinctiveness of the health care industry in

order to define products for responding to specific conditions.

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References

Aagaard, L. (2020). Marketing of healthcare services in Denmark: the concept of misleading

advertising. International Journal of Clinical Pharmacy, 42(6), 1524-1527.

Catana, S., & Toma, S. G. (2021). Marketing mix in healthcare services. Ovidius University

Annals, Economic Sciences Series, 21(1), 485-489.