The Optimal Design of Hospital Advertising by Means of Conjoint Measurement

Confronted with the unavoidable question of finding survival strategies in an intensely competitive market for hospital services which is characterised by a decreasing number of beds and the danger of closures, many hospitals have since implemented marketing and advertising plans. While the share of the marketing budget used for advertisements in print media is constantly increasing, it has turned out that such advertising campaigns are not always effective. Although clients are open towards hospital advertising, is has not been clearly proven that they use advertisements as a source of information in the situation of choosing a hospital. As a consequence, advertising is often criticized as being largely ineffective. In the consideration of these findings, the authors present an empirical study with the objective of investigating the influence of different elements in hospital advertisements on their preference on the basis of analysis of variance and Conjoint measurement