Entrench Your Place in the Minds of Your Customers
Market positioning is arranging for a brand to occupy a clear and desirable place, relative to competing brands, in the minds of target consumers. Medical professionals are overloaded with information about products and services. They cannot re-evaluate providers every time they make a referral decision. To simplify referral decisions, doctors and case managers organize providers into categories in their minds – they “position” you relative to your competitors. A brand’s position is a complex set of impressions, feelings, and knowledge that referral sources hold for each provider. Whether you have a market positioning strategy or not, if the referral source cares about your practice at all, you will be positioned. You do not want to leave your market position to chance. Implement a market positioning strategy that will give your brand the greatest advantage in your market.
Think of your market position as a more comprehensive concept than each singular sales strength. For instance, BMW may have softer and more durable leather than Volkswagen. This is a sales strength that adds to the larger concept that BMW is the luxury sports car. A home health agency that has a directly employed therapy team may position itself as the “home rehab agency” to differentiate themselves from the other agencies promoting nursing first and therapy second. This is not to say that one good sales strength might not be a good positioning strategy. A home health agency that gives twice the number of visits per episode compared to its competitors might position itself as “providing more care.”
If you want to occupy a position already occupied by a competitor, this can sometimes be accomplished by further refining and defining the position itself. For instance, two competing hospital affiliated programs may want to position themselves as institutional and well-established. Spoils would go to the competitor that would further define that position as institutional and the best qualified (frequently listing the certifications and higher degrees on staff).
Market positioning strategies that run counter to the truth don’t work. The concept that marketing lets you pick a weakness and say the opposite is a common, counterproductive myth. For instance, in the 80s, Ford attempted to position itself as an American producer of quality cars with the catch phrase “Quality is Job 1.” However, a host of recalls and general discontent with product quality caused this marketing effort to miss with consumers. After decades of advertising, it took a few years of actual improvements in quality for Ford to achieve the somewhat unexciting 2010 accomplishment of a 7th place ranking in perceived car quality.
Referral-based health care providers should constantly be thinking about how to improve their services next. A good market positioning strategy can guide that planning. For instance, if your physical therapy practice has positioned itself as the one with a hands-off approach to maximize patient self-efficacy, advertising new manual therapy certifications or pain relieving modalities might undermine your positioning strategy. A better strategy might be to advertise certification in a new, ball-based dynamic stability program that would add to the hands-off market position.
Because market position is a dance with the competition, it is appropriate to change the strategy periodically in rapidly changing markets. An agency that responded to referrals in 24 hours may have positioned itself as the fast one. In large markets, however, many home health agencies now respond to referrals in two to four hours. If the 24-hour agency can’t get faster, it needs to change its market positioning strategy before it gets positioned as “the agency that used to be fast.”
Employing a market positioning strategy can synergistically enhance your other marketing efforts and entrench your positive place in the minds of your referral sources.
