Advertising and marketing are an increasingly important area of activity for healthcare provider organizations. Hospitals and other healthcare providers rely on marketing campaigns to engage with their patients, encourage individuals to seek out necessary medical assistance, and provide public health education services. Given the importance of hospital advertising for the economic viability of healthcare, individual health outcomes, and the broader public health environment, ensuring its effectiveness is a particularly urgent task. To that end, marketing decision-making for healthcare organizations should incorporate the use of quantitative methods and data. By taking quantitative insights about consumer preferences into account, hospital organizations can refine their messaging and improve patient satisfaction. In this essay, I will discuss my use of quantitative methods in visual marketing design as part of a hospital advertising campaign.
While working for a hospital in my home country, I was involved in developing marketing plans and designs. The goal was to advertise the hospital’s services and products to a broader audience and spread public information about healthy lifestyle choices. The hospital’s marketing activities were impeded by the poor state of education about the importance of healthcare services among parts of the target audience, resulting in indifference towards its offerings. It also had to compete with large volumes of advertising from other sources, including competing healthcare providers. Seeking to stand out among the competition and draw attention from the less-informed parts of the audience, the hospital decided to implement a visual marketing strategy. This strategy used the vivid effect created by posters and other pictures to communicate key ideas to the audience (Mizik & Hanssens, 2018). The next decision-making problem that needed to be resolved was how to ensure a maximally effective visual design.
I approached this problem through the use of a quantitative marketing research technique known as conjoint analysis. This popular quantitative method is frequently used to refine product features but has also found numerous alternative uses, including content advertising (Mizik & Hanssens, 2018). Conjoint analysis works by decomposing objects into their constituent elements and examining which of them has the most effect on consumer preferences. I created several versions of the advertising poster for healthy food choices. The versions were used in an online survey that asked its participants which variant made them more likely to alter their lifestyles or use the hospital’s services. The survey sample was demographically weighted to be representative of the hospital’s target audience. The survey results were studied based on the differences in poster version characteristics, such as text, imagery, and colors. All of them were assigned different values that were compared in the final analysis, allowing me to select an optimal visual design for the poster. The marketing campaign went ahead, attracting new patients to the hospital and ensuring the spread of public health information.
Quantitative methods are an invaluable tool in advertising and marketing research. They allow marketers to analyze consumer preferences using scientific methods, acquiring the insights necessary to make informed decisions. My experience with the hospital’s advertising campaign illustrates the advantages that this approach presents. Rather than guess what design decisions would be most effective, I used conjoint analysis to determine the effect of different poster elements on the target audience. As a result, the hospital was able to carry out a visual marketing campaign tailored towards its audience, achieving greater success than it would have otherwise.
References
Mizik, N. & Hanssens, D. M. (Eds.). (2018). Handbook of marketing analytics: Methods and applications in marketing management, public policy, and litigation support. Edward Elgar Publishing.