Healthcare Branding and Consumer Patronage in Ghana.

Abstract

Healthcare is a very personalized and important service that is globally used which considerably affects economies and the quality of daily lives. In most parts of the world and Ghana, healthcare is experiencing unprecedented growth with changing cost structures and healthcare laws are also evolving. As a corollary, healthcare providers are experiencing increased competitive pressures providing consumers with a lot of options and making them active decision makers in their healthcare choices with insistence on greater quality of service. Though healthcare providers especially those located in metropolitan areas are making a concerted effort to apply the concept of branding to differentiate their services from the competition in order to enhance patronage for their hospitals, they still lag behind other service industries in this regard. Several studies have been conducted on service branding especially in the banking and telecommunication sector. However, scanty attention is given in literature to branding and clients’re-patronage in the healthcare industry as a whole and particularly in Ghana. On this premise, this study sought to investigate the relationship between healthcare branding and consumer re-patronage in Ghana. A quantitative approach was employed and structured questionnaire was used to gather data. The study was a cross-sectional survey of 318 outpatients (respondents) of 4 (2 public and 2 private) hospitals who were purposively and conveniently sampled. Data was analyzed using Exploratory Factor Analysis and multiple regression models. The findings revealed both direct and indirect influence of branding on clients’re-patronage. Specifically though branding influences client's re-patronage of hospitals services, it does so more through the hospital brand image. These findings therefore brought to light the need for hospital managers to focus on building strong and positive hospital brand image by focusing on services, brand elements (name and signage), facilities and personnel. Particularly, by enhancing their array of services, improving the status and performance of the physical health facilities and environment, and raising and keeping the standards of medical staff competence and practices, hospitals create impressions of a wholesome healthcare provider, with reliable services which form the basis for consumer re-patronage decisions in healthcare.