A marketing mix typology for integrated care: the 10 Ps

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to accentuate the role of marketing as an integrator in integrated care through a marketing mix typology. To do so, this paper adopts a conceptual and contextual route to investigation by using the marketing mix as a conceptual lens to explain the role of marketing as an integrator in the context of integrated care. In doing so, this paper offers fresh insights into how the marketing mix can be reconfigured from a product, price, place, promotion, people, process, physical evidence, packaging, partnership, and policy perspective. Thus, this paper makes a seminal contribution to the interdisciplinary field of health-care marketing by being the first to introduce a new marketing mix typology in the form of a 10 Ps framework for integrated care and to conceptually illustrate how contextualizing the marketing mix can help encourage and facilitate the adoption of and participation in integrated care.

KEYWORDS:

• 10 Ps
• marketing mix
• integrated care
• typology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Marketing mix was a concept coined in the 1960s. It did not emerge from empirical research but from marketing theorists. The development of the paper through a conceptual and contextual route was therefore considered by the author and the reviewers as appropriate from its school of thought.

2. The author adopted a deductive approach to source for prior studies that could offer maiden support to the 10 Ps marketing mix typology for integrated care. In particular, the author performed a Google Scholar search on articles published in ‘marketing’ journals during a 10-year period from ‘2010 to 2019’ using keywords such as ‘health care’, ‘integrated care’, ‘marketing mix’, ‘product’, ‘price’, ‘place’, ‘promotion’, ‘people’, ‘process’, ‘physical evidence’, ‘packaging’, ‘partnership’, and ‘policy’. Google Scholar was selected as the search engine due to its accessibility (i.e., free to use by anyone, anywhere, anytime) and sophistication (i.e., world’s largest academic search engine) (Gusenbauer, 2019). The timeframe was limited to one decade in order to account for the most recent developments in health-care marketing (as a timeframe of more than 10 years may indicate reliance to somewhat outdated information), which is a similar, but more refined, timeframe criterion for systematic reviews used by Paul and Mas (2020).