The business case for promoting prevention through corporate cancer marketing programs
Abstract
Corporate cancer marketers use advertising strategies to meet business goals such as building awareness, attracting new patients or increasing philanthropic support for an organization. Traditionally, marketers have promoted the treatments and services offered at their healthcare facilities to consumers or potential patients to meet these objectives. This study sought to assess the relationship between marketing messages and a cancer center's business results. Specifically, could prevention messaging, which is typically not used to drive metrics such as patient leads, have a positive impact on business indicators? A retrospective, quantitative study was performed to execute this research with the aim of identifying any association between the type of messaging used in an ad campaign and subsequent business indicators. A brand advertising campaign from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center served as the case for this research. This dissertation presented nine hypotheses regarding the relationship between marketing messages and business results. A combination of descriptive statistics, correlations, linear regression analyses and Chi-Square tests was used to evaluate each of the hypotheses. This research confirmed that prevention messages were not only a viable option in the marketing program, but also led to strong action and loyalty behaviors from consumers. The results found that there were positive relationships between prevention messaging and consumer engagement, new patient leads and donations. Each of these relationships was statistically significant, and the proposed hypotheses were accepted. Similarly, there were positive relationships between the treatment message and consumer engagement, new patient leads and donations. However, only the relationship between appointment messages and consumer engagement was statistically significant. Therefore, this hypothesis was accepted and the remaining treatment hypotheses were rejected. Recommendations were made to include more prevention messaging in corporate cancer marketing programs due to its positive impact on business indicators. Inclusion of prevention messaging can not only help to enhance business results but also spread more critical health information to consumers to reduce the burden of cancer in our communities.
Subject Area
Communication|Public health
Recommended Citation
Chin, Cheryl Paula, "The business case for promoting prevention through corporate cancer marketing programs" (2014). Texas Medical Center Dissertations (via ProQuest). AAI3665366.
https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/dissertations/AAI3665366