Dental services marketing: A case of dental clinics in Iran

Abstract

Nowadays, dental clinics are accommodating themselves to the changing environments. Although, marketing may be unpopular in the past, dental clinics start to choose the benefits of marketing these days. The consumer's involvement in healthcare choices has grown exponentially; hence, hospitals must value consumer, survey their requirements, and advance satisfaction. It is a significant issue in dental services marketing to understand how consumer will choose clinic, because patients could shop among clinics and make comparisons. These days, how to get competitive benefit by enhanced operating strategy is an important issue to business success. Dental professionals have to face these challenges and prepare themselves for the upcoming future. There are many features that influence choosing the clinic. In marketing strategy, dentist must know that various groups emphasize different crucial features in choosing clinics. In this study, we have analyzed and explored the consumers' behaviors in choosing dental clinics. A data set was collected with survey questionnaire from medical university dental clinics in Qazvin, Iran. Many important factors in choosing clinics were considered. Different consumers' choices were categorized in four types of factors and ranked for different types of consumers. The relationships between demographic features of consumers with their orientations in choosing the dental clinics were also explained. Finally, we discussed the marketing implications in this context and recommended the best marketing strategy for the university clinics.

Keywords:

• Dental services
• Marketing

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Saeed Asefzadeh

Saeed Asefzadeh has been a professor at Qazvin University of Medical Sciences, Qazvin, Iran. He is research assistant of Qazvin University of Medical Sciences and recently has worked at Research Center for Social Determinants of Health, Qazvin University of Medical Sciences, Qazvin, Iran.

Sepideh Jahandideh

Sepideh Jahandideh is an MD, recently graduated in Health Care Management field, from Qazvin University of Medical Sciences, Qazvin, Iran. She worked at EDC (Education Development Center in medical sciences), Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran, for two years.

Ebrahim Barzegari Asadabadi

Ebrahim Barzegari Asadabadi is PhD candidate of Biophysics at Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran, since 2008. He took his MSc degree in Biophysics from the same university in 2008. He is interested in bioinformatics and computational biology researches and has published several papers in this field since 2005.