Marketing's Peculiarities în Health Services

SUMMARY: The present paper has as its purpose to bring in evidence some of the peculiarities of the application of marketing in the domain of health services, emphasizing the intercessions of the specific organizations initiated at the microeconomic level, and only tangentially those developed at the macroeconomic level.

For a better understanding of the way in which marketing is applied at the level of those organizations, a clarification of the health services’ content and of the specific elements that favour or limit the application of some concepts, methods and marketing techniques is necessary.

The economic-social dynamism determined a continuous extension of the field of action of marketing, especially beginning with the second half of the XX th century, in all domains and at different levels of the economic activity and even non-economic, that was accompanied by a specializing process, namely one of delimitation and adaptation of the concepts, methods and its techniques.

Among these domains we can also enroll, and successfully, the marketing of services, a specialization that took place as a result of the outstanding dynamism taking place in the last decades on the market of services, as well as of the specific characteristics of the services when compared to the goods. The characteristics of the services determined important changes in the problematic and the instrumentation of marketing, adapting them to the circumstances in which the carrier out and the consumer interact during the process of creation and delivery of the service. As a result of the heterogeneousness of the services, the specializing process of marketing in this domain deepened, generating new delimitations, so that in the present the touristic marketing, the financial-banking marketing, the cultural marketing and marketing in the domain of health elicit a great interest.

Meanwhile, beginning with the 70’s, an explosive extension of marketing and the non-economic domains took place, an incorporation of its methods and techniques within the framework of social-natured organizations, the new domain being named SOCIAL MARKETING. The process, in full progress, of validation and consolidation, is marked by a tendency of specialization, its concrete application being known by different names : political marketing, electoral marketing, educational marketing, public health marketing, religious marketing and so on.

No matter the domain in which it finds its applicability, marketing can be defined as: ” a social and managerial process through which individuals and groups of individuals obtain whatever is necessary to them and they wish through the manufacturing, offering and change of products having a certain value." The extensive development of marketing, through the penetration of more and more domains of activity, was also accompanied by an intensive development, an improvement of the methods and techniques with which it operates and the introduction of some new ones, adapted to every domain’s specific ( took separately ).

The 80’s mark the passing to a new stage in the evolution of marketing, that of societal marketing, oriented towards the environment with all its components , and characterized the assuming of some human and societal responsibilities by the organization. This new direction advocates that an organization’s duty is to determine the needs, the demands and the interests of the target-markets and to offer the expected satisfaction in a more efficient way than its competitors, so that it maintains and it increases the welfare of the consumers and of society.

As a response to the changes of the environment in which it takes action, the 90’s bring a new direction in the development of marketing, namely the passing from ”traditional marketing” to ”relational marketing”, which is seen : ” as a sum of relations, networks and interactions”. Relational marketing represents a philosophy of businesses, a strategic orientation that consists in the establishment, the preservation and the strengthening of the relations with the consumers and any other partners ( contractors, public organisms, mediators, communication media ) considering a profit, in such a manner that the sides’ objectives can be realized for long terms. Relational marketing’s nucleus is represented by the leading of the relationships with the clients, that constitutes itself in an upright component of the organization’s marketing policy, and is mainly concerned with the processes of distribution and promotion.

The health services’ specific, the way in which they are carried out, and especially the complex relationship that is established between the medical personal and client/patient enforces the employment on a large scale of relational marketing, mostly in the case of primary assistance services, offered by the family doctor.

The leadership of the relationships with clients imposes that, in the process of getting to know the demand’s carriers some stages are to be examined:

- The analysis of the essential characteristics of the relationships with the clients;

- The elaboration of a system of analysis of the defining elements of the relationships with the clients;

- The constitution of a system of indicators for the evaluation of the orientation towards client of the organization.