title: Brand strengthening decision making delved from brand-contacts in health services organizations.
abstract: Under the Japanese Government's strong enforcement of Japanese national medical cost reduction, only hospitals which emphasize patient values, and creation of brands according to them can survive. This study extracted patients' expectations as brand from Campbell's Brand-Contact lists. The authors also proposed to add Brand-strengthening strategies both for short-term strategies (large improvement is not required) and for long-term strategies (restructuring hardware and systems). This method would enable hospitals to collect customers' underlying expectations, and would create high-value brands. Trustful medical service would provide mutual and synergetic medical care effects. It is already considered out of date to conduct qualitative patient satisfaction interviews on current medical services to current customers. It is the only way to survive that hospitals themselves produce their original brands to increase patient loyalty and customer satisfaction. In the process, customer value should be reconsidered from both aspects of the quality of clinical care and of other medically related services. Then hospitals would be able to satisfy both customers' output and process expectations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Healthcare Administration, Nippon Medical School, Tokyo, Japan.
authors.forename: Kazue
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Takayanagi
authors.forename: Yukiko
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Hagihara
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D003659:Decision Making, Organizational; D006761:Hospitals; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D008389:Marketing of Health Services; D017060:Patient Satisfaction