CASE STUDY

Serving a multicultural community requires a marketing melting pot

Serving a multicultural community requires a marketing melting pot

Introduction

The article, “Serving a multicultural community requires a marketing melting pot”, explains how serving ethnic markets requires effective business development strategy.It discusses an effort of developing a maternity service hospital in a diverse ethnic community, i.e. Mid-western community. It also discusses how the researcher utilized and implemented different business development and marketing strategies from the maternity service hospital's inception to its success.Discussion

The article explains that it required a complete business development strategy aided with proper marketing research, to launch a maternity service hospital in the Midwestern community. Midwestern community is quite diverse, and has a large number of ethnic groups. For the development of the maternity service hospital, proper and thorough marketing research was conducted. There was a focus on healthy public relations with each ethnic target market group for developing its good-will. A strong community presence was also developed for customized maternity services (Rainey, 2006).

In a health-care market setting, one cannot just apply marketing efforts for the launching of a service. All the stake-holders, i.e. patients, payers, and providers (3 Ps), want to see evidence. The classic dilemma in health markets is that the information is always changing and in flux. It requires proper mix of evidence for the need of product/service, evidence of product/service potential to outperform the existing players, and effective leadership.

Developing a maternity service hospital in a diverse community is a daunting task, and this challenge was taken on by the Midwestern community. It required precise evaluation of community demographics and their needs. The market research was conducted for gathering and analyzing the information of the service area. It enabled the researcher to know about the service area and the customers (Malhotra, 2008).Service Area Analysis

Initially the researcher performed the service area analysis. The entire service area had 158,329 women of child-bearing age, with 15.3% living in the primary area and 84.7% living in the secondary area. The figure of child-bearing aged women was expected to decline by 7%. Thirteen maternity-service hospitals existed in a 10-mile radius of the primary service area. The figures found are provided below.

72.2% non-Hispanic white.

7% African-American or black.

0.5% Native American.

11.2% Asian or Pacific Islander.

9.1% others.

The research showed that in Midwestern community Asians and Hispanics were in a large number, when compared to national and state population proportion. The Caucasian population had the majority of recent immigrants from the Middle ...