Healthcare market research can provide an incredible amount of information about how consumers perceive a health system. Who comes to mind first? Which organization is perceived as having the best quality? Which providers or health systems do consumers prefer? How do they make healthcare decisions? What factors are most important when choosing care options? The possibilities are almost endless.
Therein lies one of the biggest challenges in healthcare market research: just because you can ask a question doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
When planning a research project, it’s tempting to try to get as much information as possible; you have consumers’ attention, you have an opportunity to ask questions, why not take advantage of it? But consumers have limited time and patience. Asking respondents to complete a long, complicated survey can lead to lower participation, rushed answers, and respondent fatigue—and in an environment already crowded with spam calls, political surveys, and other requests for attention, we need to be respectful of theirs. The better approach is to hone in on the specific objective of the research.
General Branding Research Has a Purpose
This doesn’t mean a broad healthcare branding study is a bad idea. Quite the opposite: general branding research is extremely valuable, and we conduct these types of studies regularly.
A well-designed branding study can provide a consistent view of how health systems are positioned in the market. Questions about top-of-mind awareness, preference, quality perceptions, and other key brand measures can help organizations understand their overall position relative to competitors.
The key is recognizing that a general branding study is designed to provide a broad view. If you want to deeply understand a particular issue, it may make more sense to conduct research specifically focused on that issue. Advertising is a good example.
When the Research Question Gets More Specific
Suppose a health system wants to understand how its advertising is performing. You might want to know:
- Do consumers recall seeing the advertising?
- Which competitors’ advertising do they recall?
- Where did they see or hear the advertising?
- What did they think of it?
- Did the advertising make the health system more appealing?
- Did it influence their healthcare decisions?
- Which messages, images, or taglines were most effective?
Those are all valuable questions, but they can quickly turn a simple branding study into a very lengthy advertising study. Even something as seemingly straightforward as advertising awareness can become complicated.
You could ask, “Have you seen advertising for ABC Health System in the past month?” That gives you a basic measure of recall—but what if you want to understand awareness of five competitors as well? Now you have five additional questions. If you want to know where consumers saw those ads, you may need to ask about television, radio, billboards, social media, websites, streaming services, and other media. Add questions about effectiveness, emotional response, message clarity, and shifted perceptions, and you’re no longer asking a few advertising questions within a branding study — you’re running a full advertising research project. That’s not a bad thing. It can be extremely valuable research. It’s just a different project.
The Same Applies to Service Lines
The same principle applies to specific healthcare service lines. A health system may want to understand perceptions of its cancer, heart, orthopedic, maternity, women’s health, pediatric, and neurological services. In a typical branding survey, you might ask which organization consumers believe is best for each service, and that works fine.
But what if you want to understand why? Awareness, reputation, quality perceptions, likelihood to consider, provider relationships, competitors, access, convenience, technology, facilities — the number of questions grows exponentially. Trying to cover every service line (or even one) in depth within a general branding study can result in a survey that’s simply too long to be effective. A targeted service line research project, on the other hand, can go deep and prove extremely valuable for that specific line.
One Research Project. One Primary Objective.
This is why we believe it’s important to define the primary objective of a research project before developing the questionnaire. At PRC, we offer several approaches depending on what a health system is trying to accomplish:
- Understanding overall brand strength and competitive positioning: our Brand Intelligence Survey uses a consistent set of measures that allows us to calculate our Brand Power Index® and understand how a health system is positioned within its market. Every health system can customize and add a few important elements, with the understanding that the primary objective remains a broad view of market perceptions.
- Evaluating advertising: a custom Ad Testing study focused specifically on advertising awareness, media exposure, creative elements, taglines, imagery, emotional response, message effectiveness, and impact.
- Understanding a particular service line: research built around that service line—exploring not only perceptions of the health system’s own services, but competitors, independent practices, physician relationships, partnerships, and the factors that actually influence consumers’ choices. The same approach applies to cancer, heart, women’s health, or virtually any other service line.
PRC can also develop custom surveys around other objectives—outmigration, for example, or understanding emerging markets a health system is considering moving into. The important distinction is that each research project has a different objective.
Better Research Starts with Better Focus
There’s an understandable temptation to combine everything into one study—if you’re already talking to consumers, why not ask a few more questions? It feels like you’re saving time and money by getting more from the same respondents. But there’s a point where “getting more information” starts to work against you: longer surveys reduce participation, increase fatigue, and can compromise data quality. What looks like a shortcut can end up costing more in the end.
More questions don’t necessarily mean more useful information.
Before developing a questionnaire, ask yourself: What decision are we trying to make with this research? What do we need to know to make it? Once those questions are answered, the research becomes much easier to design. The goal isn’t to learn everything from consumers in one survey. The goal is to learn the right things from them.
If you need help defining the focus and objectives of your research, send us an email today at [email protected]!
About the Author
Keith Schneider
Director, Market Perception
Joining PRC in 2002 with a lifelong passion for branding, Keith employs a deep-seated set of marketing and research skills to help clients obtain actionable insights that will enable them to make strategic decisions to deliver quality care in ways that elevate their brand. During his tenure at PRC, Keith has managed hundreds of complex, custom research projects for healthcare organizations throughout the United States, overseeing the sample design stages, script-writing functions, and sample generation for PRC’s computer-aided telephone interviewing system as well as electronic surveys. Through timely deliverables and engaging, informative presentations, Keith helps ensure that clients have the data they need to assess their image, interpret the findings and fulfill all their research objectives. He currently leads PRC’s Market Perception division and guides custom research to enhance clients’ marketing and branding efforts. Keith earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Nebraska–Omaha.