Definition of Health Care Marketing

Definition of Marketing by different societies
The American Marketing Association
"the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large". 

Kotler & Armstrong 
"a social and managerial process by which individuals and organizations obtain what they need and want through creating and ex- changing value with others"

differnces between the health care services in general from the other economic fields  are the primary aims to help others, the aspiration to save human life and to improve the quality of life. However, those are very difficult to grasp and any measurement, from an economic point of view, is highly problematic.
Buckley 
marketing in the health care sector as self-education with the aim to find the needs and requirements of potential clients. Consequently, we will attract those clients if we are able to offer the required services when needed, at the right time and in the right place. Winston (1985) de nes marketing in health care sector as a discipline that helps us understand:
 Functioning of current marketing services
 The role of health care institutions in providing the health care services
 Mechanism for balancing the capacity of establishment with service demand  The way to establish the level of client satisfaction
Winston (1985) also defines the initial assumptions when applying marketing strategies in health care:

1. In the health care sector a client is a patient.
   
2. A patient's recommendation is the biggest marketing success of the health care establish-
   ment's marketing.
   
3. Every health care institution has to evaluate the effectiveness of their services regularly and
   must not assume the fact that having clients using their services means that they are indeed
   satisfied.
   
4. Marketing is a useful management tool but it cannot offer solutions to all problems re-
   lated to the effective management of a successful organisation. 
   It has to be complemented by financial management, human resource management, strategic planning and economic analyses.
   

If we were to apply a definition of marketing in the health care sector to hospitals, we could state that hospital marketing is the process of recognizing the needs and requirements of clients, anticipating demands and reacting and meeting requirements in such a manner that brings both client satisfaction as well as ensuring the effective financial management of the hospital. Accord- ing to Gladkij (2003) the focus of marketing management is mainly to establish long term goals in regards to expected external economic trends.
Competition in the hospital market provides the groundwork for the application of marketing management and marketing tools in this Field. According to Hoffmann, Grossterlin