Marketing Matters: A Guide for Healthcare Executives (ACHE Management)

Marketing is more than a television ad for a new birthing center or press coverage of a health fair. Marketing is reputation management. Marketing has become increasingly important to all healthcare managers, not just marketers, and only senior management can ensure that any marketing plan faithfully reflects the organization’s image and strategic thrust.

This book explains what marketing is, what it can contribute to your organization, how it is done, and how it is measured. This straightforward guide will help you become a better marketer—not in the sense of developing marketing campaigns but using marketing to shape and control your organization’s reputation.

Topics covered include:

The marketing process The senior manager’s role in marketing Marketing research and planning The dollars and sense of marketing Market positioning and strategy development The promotional toolbox The changing marketing paradigm Measuring the effectiveness of marketing

Richard K. Thomas, PhD, is vice president of Health and Performance Re¬sources in Memphis, Tennessee, and has been involved in healthcare mar¬ket research and consultation with hospitals, clinics, health plans, and other healthcare organizations in both the public and private sectors for more than 40 years. He holds faculty appointments at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and the University of Mississippi, where he is also a research associate at the Center for Population Studies. Dr. Thomas is active in publishing and has authored or co-authored 20 books on health-related topics, most notably health services planning, health¬care market research, and the demography of health and healthcare. He has authored dozens of articles on healthcare and given numerous presentations, seminars, and workshops on related subjects. He previously served as the editor of Marketing Health Services, the healthcare journal of the American Marketing Association. Dr. Thomas holds MAs in sociology and geography from the Univer¬sity of Memphis and a PhD in medical sociology from Vanderbilt University.