I know I’m about five years behind everyone else, having only just bought and read Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, however I was very taken by the argument and thought it still shows much relevance today.
The NHS is constantly striving for very good, great and excellent as a way to attract patients to use them, but remarkable never comes into the equation. In the NHS, quality is the latest ‘buzzword’ and national ratings demonstrate the quality of service any patient can expect from their local hospital. Trusts strive to achieve an ‘excellent’ rating and use this as part of their marketing pitch – however, as Seth points out, people aren’t going to talk about a quality service (its an expectation), but they’ll talk about a remarkable service.
We know the media love a remarkably bad NHS story – it sells papers after all – but where are the remarkably good stories? How can the 200+ hospitals in the country develop a remarkable product to stand out from the others? They won’t of course, it won’t be possible for all them to be unique, but it can’t hurt them trying!
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Tags: blog, blogging, NHS, quality, remarkable, Seth Godin
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onewomanandherblog
Absolutely. In the current climate of Choice and the new competitive marketplace for hospitals, any positive news or examples of exceeding targets can potentially be used as a marketing advantage. A topic I hope to be looking at in more detail for my dissertation!
I appreciate this will make me sound incredibly dumb and old-fashioned, but in what sense is a hospital a product? What are you marketing? To whom? If I have a broken leg I want to go to the nearest A&E to get it fixed, I don’t want a brochure explaining to me the range of casts I might be able to have fitted at different hospitals (I simplify, but you get the point) I’m genuinely perplexed about marketing in the NHS, having never quite got my head round parent choice in the education system. All the research I ever saw when I was at DFES said that what parents want is good local schools so they can be confident about sending their children to the school down the road without having what can feel like a pretend choice between different kinds of schools. Sorry, I don’t get it and I’d really like to understand! Can someone explain?
After reading this blog I thought it remarkable that we had not had a “bad press” story about the NHS too recently. At one time, it appeared that the media used to bash the NHS for a little light relief!
Marketing the NHS – promoting how remarkable they are – well are they not? To third world countries and even our over the Atlanticcousins in the States, the NHS is truly remarkable. Unfortunately we get so used to having it that we forget how lucky we are.
I think there are difficulties in communicating about human experiences that most of us would rather not think about. We dont want to think about illness and death in the real world.
Beating targets doesnt really send me – human stories are what people are interested in (Grey’s Anatomy, Holby City, Dr Finlay!!!).
NHS is also just so vast. GPs, nurses, paramedics, consultants all have their own perceptions. The 60th Anniversary did a lot of good.