Examination of Hospital Billboards

There are times in every life when it seems that competitors and detractors are determined to outweigh the voices of common sense, and indeed when one’s competition is willing to stoop to low acts, it can be difficult to see a way in which to confront the issue without retaliating in kind. Nevertheless, a close examination of the issue at hand may reveal that the situation is not truly as dire as it may seem, for in tipping their hands, opponents may actually succeed only in clouding the general view of their actions with negativity. Such pitfalls are particularly wide-open when the entities in question are not people, but rather, organizations that are often held to a higher standard than is the average in the world of business. Hospitals, by their very nature, are judged and scrutinized more harshly when perceived by the public and by investors and stakeholders to be more focused upon growing their wealth than upon treating patients with the greatest skill and compassion possible. Thus, whereas both Briarwood Hospital and Crestview Hospital face challenges as a result of Crestview’s decision to place billboards near Briarwood property, the downside is not as great as it seems for Briarwood, and, conversely, the upside is not as great as it seems for Crestview.

By posting the billboards near the Briarwood Hospital grounds, Crestview Hospital gains visibility that might draw potential patients away from Briarwood, but at the cost of both confusing the point that the hospitals are two separate entities and perhaps even alienating patients. The former point is more readily addressed by the billboard content itself, which might even spell out in detail that Briarwood and Crestview are two separate entities, not a joint effort using a commonly held space to advertise mutual holdings. Such detail may seem hard to get across merely on a billboard, but in fact, customers have a much greater capacity for understanding longer content than is sometimes assumed. This point is best made by White (2012), who concludes that “mediating poster and billboard marketing messages over as short a time-space as possible is not prescriptive to the successful reception of that message even in an age of information overload” (p. 1). In contrast, the alienation issue cannot be addressed by lengthier billboard content; that it is a mildly distasteful thing to advertise one’s for-profit hospital within a stone’s throw of a nonprofit hospital cannot be avoided. Nevertheless, the visibility Crestview gains may well prove worth the potential consequences. Customers and community stakeholders, it is true, may react against the billboards if critical thought is applied, but for those not paying terribly close attention, perhaps only the message of Crestview as providing the “best” medical care in Oakland may come through. For Briarwood, on the other side of the matter, the situation looks troubling indeed.

Though it may indeed be tempting to suggest that Briarwood Hospital “fight fire with fire,” to put it colloquially, by retaliating with an attempt to similarly place a billboard of their own on Crestview Hospital’s property, far from being helpful, instead, this would only serve to be counterproductive to Briarwood Hospital’s purposes. At this point, a good deal of what Briarwood must strive to achieve involves differentiating itself from Crestview in order that the hospital may counter the potential view, in the eye of the public, that the two hospitals are actually part of one larger entity. The billboard, in absence of any other explanation, may have led to such an impression, and thus, posting billboards supporting Briarwood near Crestview property would only have the opposite effect of that intended, namely, to ensure that people understand the truly separate nature of the two hospitals. Going forward, this must be the “pattern of decisions” described in Varadarajan’s (2010) work on strategic marketing, for entry markets or competitive strategies as well as for other marketing situations: “At the broadest level marketing strategy can be defined as an organization’s integrated pattern of decisions that specify its crucial choices concerning products, markets, marketing activities, and marketing resources that offer value to customers in exchanges with the organization . . . ” (p. 119). This definition would be useful for Briarwood to keep in mind going forward, as it so neatly sums up the various topics which must be addressed once a more detailed level of planning manifests itself. However, any marketing strategy also needs to take into account marketing communications, as seen in the marketing efforts of Scarlet Hospital.

In order to best facilitate remedying the possible misperception that Crestview and Briarwood are one, both hospitals must make sure that their marketing communications strategies emphasize differentiation. To put such a concept briefly, what needs to be communicated, primarily, is a sense of branding. The billboards that Briarwood puts up if any must be as different in look and feel as possible. When designing the billboards and the messages behind them, Briarwood must take care to emphasize its non-profit status, as this is the only real factor differentiating it from Crestview at present, though of course its longer history could also be emphasized. Then, it will be seen for Briarwood as it has been seen for others that, “Over time, as consumers come to associate a brand with a specific benefit, the brand acts as a stake in the ground, claiming territorial rights over its value proposition” (Dawar & Marketing, 2012, p. 1). The “special benefit” that Briarwood offers is its nonprofit status; this could be spun to imply that Briarwood cares more than Crestview about its patients. Crestview, on the other hand, can take just the opposite strategy with what it communicates through its marketing. Crestview must emphasize that being for-profit could potentially give greater access to better care due to the larger revenue involved. In both cases, it is necessary to convince the governing boards of the importance of distributing these messages in a proactive manner. The most compelling arguments will come from the close competition between the two hospitals and the idea that if one hospital waits, the other might act first and thus stake a claim on patients. However, of course, it is also well known that there is a body of research supporting the proactive position. These two ideas combined will help convince the governing boards of what needs to be done.

The most useful marketing research tool for both hospitals is the consumer assessment survey. Though Churchill and Iagobucci (2009) describe a wide variety of marketing research tools, most are not terribly applicable to the current situation. Due to the nature of hospitals—i.e., that their “customers” are real patients who would rather not be there if it could be avoided—forming focus groups would be challenging, as would designing experiments, for consumers are unlikely to react similarly to hypothetical situations in the ways they do when genuinely sick. Even with the surveys, care must be taken to only use the tool on actual patients in the hospital, most likely upon or shortly after discharge and quite possibly combined with surveys of family members who accompanied the patient. This will maximize the intersection of authentic results while minimizing the disruption to patient healing. The surveys must as questions such as what made the patient choose this hospital, perhaps also asking if the patient is aware of the competing hospital by name, and if so, what made them choose their current choice over the other hospital. The distinction between quantitative and qualitative market research tools that Zikmund and Babin ( 2012) describe is also relevant, but again due to the unique nature of hospitals as businesses, quantitative measures have likely already been gathered in the course of collecting patient information. Thus, the only task that must be done with the quantitative data is to ensure marketing staff has access to it; hence, the tools above focus on qualitative aspects. Altogether, after assessing the variety of marketing tools available to Briarwood and Crestview, it is clear that surveys upon patient discharge provide the newest information.

Briarwood Hospital and Crestview hospital do indeed find themselves in an awkward situation due to the placement of Crestview billboards near Briarwood, but through careful management of public perception to distinguish between the two hospitals, the pair can maintain the healthy competition that has driven them both to greater success. Maintaining one’s identity in the face of potential confusion over unclear or mixed messages given to the public at large is important for any business entity and not only for hospitals. Indeed, it can be said that branding is, in one sense, the only form of marketing, for only those who know a product’s name can ask for it or seek it out. This is true from the smallest to the largest corporation, and, going forward into an age of increasing technological literacy, it will only continue to be truer. 

References

Churchill Jr, G. A., & Iacobucci, D. (2009). Marketing research: Methodological foundations. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.

Dawar, N., & Marketing, M. S. (2012). What are brands good for? Image.

Varadarajan, R. (2010). Strategic marketing and marketing strategy: Domain, definition, fundamental issues, and foundational premises. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 38(2), 119-140.

White, P. J. (2012). Getting attention, keeping the attention and measuring attention in the age of information overload: Billboard and poster advertising in the 21st century. (Doctoral dissertation, AUT University).

Zikmund, W. G., & Babin, B. J. (2012). Essentials of marketing research. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.