Article: Toward a hospital marketing Attitudes, practices and representations of French managers

Dominique CRIÉ*, Daphné SALERNO** et Amandine VINCENT***

* IAE, Université de Lille 1 - Lille Économie Management (UMR CNRS 8179)
** IAE, Université de Lille 1 - Lille Économie Management (UMR CNRS 8179)
*** Master 2 MESS (Management des Entreprises du Secteur de la Santé) - IAE, Université de Lille 1

Abstract

For several years, the opportunity to use hospital marketing tools is being debated. This exploratory research aims to better understand the attitudes, practices and representations of French managers about marketing at hospital. Eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted on this target. Different methods of textual analysis were applied to the corpus of transcripts of interviews. Semantic analysis can distinguish three categories of representations, attitudes and practices of marketing. The same type of analysis was applied to the communication, which seems to be better anchored in practice. An exploratory typology according to the methods of textual statistics was then performed. The results are then discussed. We conclude that the marketing process is unknown from managers who preferentially use communication often off a strategic framework. Nevertheless they consider marketing as needed to adapt to societal and financial contingencies of T2A.