Responses to Physician Advertising in the Yellow Pages

Abstract

Despite the growing use of marketing tools by medical professionals, there is little experimental evidence regarding the effectiveness of physician advertising. Virtually nothing is known about the one communication medium physicians are mostly likely to consider acceptable—the yellow pages. Using a 4 × 2 factorial design, this study investigates the influence of type of ad and type of clinic on patient responses to yellow pages advertising for a physician's services. The results suggest that, with few exceptions, consumers prefer more information to less.