Marketing boca a boca em um hospital privado no município de São Paulo: aplicabilidade da escala de Brown

Abstract

Health care services are provided in an environment that is currently changing. For instance, health care providers must address changes in customer profile, technological advances and increased competition. As a consequence, health care providers must seek to enhance their organizational and operational output by adapting their organizational structure to fit current client and market demands. These organizational changes, therefore, can be seen as natural changes, which are influenced by the specific environment in which organizations operate. The hospital, which is a health care provider with an extremely complex organizational structure, also had to increase its capacity to create and implement strategies to overcome current market challenges in order to reach organizational goals and thrive in its respective sector. The increased competition and the changes in the relationship between clients and organizations have created the need to standout from the competition; that is, clients expect increasingly higher quality products and services. As a consequence, it is essential to the survival of any service organization to achieve a high level of client satisfaction by employing a marketing campaign that not only strengthens the relationship between clients and organizations but also generates a positive word of mouth communication process. Therefore, the real objective of this paper is to assess the market impact that such operational and marketing strategies have on a hospital that is currently adapting its organizational structure in order to compete in its respective sector. To clarify, this assessment analyzes the interactions between the determinants of positive word of mouth communication, client loyalty, the intention to recommend the services to others and the actual consumer recommendation behaviour proposed by Brown et al. (2005).