External marketing environment as perceived by managers from Romanian hospitals

Abstract

A company's marketing macro - and microenvironment influences its ability to satisfy the customers' needs and desires. Thus, a strategic dimension of any company should be to identify, monitor and analyze the trends in the major components of its environment, aiming at harvesting the opportunities and diminishing the evolving threats. The studies concerning the situation of Romanian health care marketing activity show that the organizations' management is rather oriented towards cost control, not towards providing value to the patient/customer. The perceived marketing orientation is a declarative, not a real one. [1]. This paper aims at identifying the elements of the external marketing environment perceived by the managers of Romanian hospitals as having the higher importance for their field of activity. The sample consists of 11 hospitals located in North-West Romanian Development Region. The performed research is a quantitative one, based on three different types of GLOBE questionnaires. The data was collected in January- March 2009 on a sample of 82 health care providers' managers. The research outcomes exclusively reflect the behavior of the surveyed managers. The main finding is the following: for Romanian managers, external marketing microenvironment's components are more important than macro environment's elements. © 2009 Springer.