DMN3 Blog

So often businesses bring a quality product or service to market and hope, “if we build it…they will come.”

Understanding your market and customers is fundamental to any sales process.   Businesses often fail to do the very necessary ground work that can mean the difference between success or failure of their venture. There is a very big chasm to cross to transform a “good” product or service to a “successful” product or service.

You need to understand:

• Who will buy (Market Segments and the 3 P's - pain, problem or predicament)
• What will motivate them to buy (Value Proposition cast as a “solution” to customers' 3P's, and a marketing message addressing emotional and rational needs/justifications)
• Why will they buy from you versus a competitor (Unique Selling Proposition and a good understanding of competitors)

In future posts, I will discuss in more detail:

• Customer and Competitor Insight
• Customer Value Proposition (VP)
• Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

I recently had the opportunity to tour Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) as part of the engagement with DMN3. While I have 30 years experience in healthcare marketing and communications for both small hospitals and major health academic centers, I was thoroughly impressed with what I saw.

It soon became clear that Texas Children’s Hospital understands its primary customers: Children!  While they have a number of other important customer segments (families of patients, referring physicians, employees, insurance providers),  the foundation of their business is children. It begins with excellent clinical care - without good outcomes, nothing else really matters.

Fortunately for its patients, Texas Children’s Hospital delivers very high quality care. It is recognized as one of the Top 10 Children’s Hospitals in the United States by U.S. News. Click here to see for yourself!

However, the point of this blog post is not about TCH's quality clinical care, but rather how TCH institutionalized its insights into child patients to address their physical and emotional needs while in a hospital setting. Let’s face it - the last place you want to be when you're sick is in the hospital. For children, this kind of clinical and open environment is often much more scary than an adult in the same situation.

A child's need to be comfortable underpins TCH's approach to healthcare delivery. TCH also understands that it is a lot easier to treat its patients when their need for comfort and understanding are being addressed as part of the overall experience. Because of TCH, and any children's hospital that understand its customer and market,  adolescent patients are much more comfortable than they otherwise would be. 

Furthermore, happier patients, along with good overall outcomes, mean less stress for families.  This, and other TCH family-focused programs, assist in managing its secondary customer market segment - the patient's family.  TCH understands that patient is not the only person experiencing emotional distress and lack of comfort, but also the mom and dad and sister or brother.  

Texas Children’s Hospital utilizes its customer insight to transform the facility into a child-friendly environment. Without TCH's customer insight, who knows, it could just be an adult hospital with smaller beds and lots of patients.

If I were a child in need of hospitalization, I know where I would want to go...