Assignment 2: Competition, Marketing Mix, and Pricing

Marketing and Health Care
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Marketing and Health Care
With the increasing number of healthcare providers, both public and private, entering the industry, it is beyond reasonable doubts that the market is highly competitive. This means that for every medical service provider to survive must be competitive to overcome the competitors and attract customers. Saint Luke's Medical Centre is an example of a healthcare service provider that has survived enormous competition from other healthcare providers located in Arizona. St Luke's Medical Centre has been on the market for over 100 years offering services such as heart care, emergency care, rehabilitation services, sports medicine, surgical medicine and orthopedic care among many other medical services. Despite its success so far, it still needs a well-formulated marketing plan that can be achieved through the establishment of the key characteristics of the customers/ patients, analysis of the competitive environment, determining the appropriate marketing mix and coming up with a pricing strategy that can be adopted for its products and services.
Key Characteristics of the St Luke's Medical Care Customers
Marketing medical service and products is not an easy task. However, by paying close attention to the customer or patient characteristics, healthcare providers can profile their marketing and promotion strategies to congregate the needs and wants of their prospects and clients (Baker, 2014). Concerning St Luke's Medical Centre, the customers' characteristics can be classified into demographics, psychographics, and behaviors. Under demographics, the customers for St Luke's Medical Centre can be described as comprising of people aged 18 years and above representing about 77% of the entire population. 16% are aged 65 years and above. This means that majority of the people are aged between 18 and 65 years (Drummond, Sculpher, Claxton, Stoddart, & Torrance, 2015). Most of them are married with at least one child. A majority are the white Americans, but there are also other races such as the Hawaiians, African Americans, Hispanics and Indians. The customers are drawn from both genders at an almost equal percentage (Baker, 2014). Most of them are working class citizens. Their combined annual family income averages $50,000 and above (Baker, 2014). Also, the majority of the patients are high school graduates and higher, and therefore most of the can speak and understand English while presenting their cases at the hospital (Baker, 2014). Identify key customer characteristics enables the business to segment the market into segments of customers sharing equal needs and can adequately be met through customized services.
The Competitive Environment of St Luke Medical Centre
St Luke Healthcare Centre faces competition at all levels as far as their services are concerned. One of the major competitors located in the same county with St Luke's Healthcare is Vanguard health systems. Vanguard offers services similar to those of St Luke at relatively the same prices (Enthoven, 2014). Other competitors within the county include Surgicenter which specializes in surgical operations, West Valley Hospital and St Joseph hospital and medical cent...