Hospital branding as a strategy for differentiation

: does hospital branding leverages hospital units in Portuguese market?

Abstract

Hospital Branding has grown in the Portuguese healthcare market as a strategy to create a unified image to consumers, as well as executing common practices among hospitals to ensure a certain level of quality expected by patients. This dissertation aimed to understand if Hospital Branding could be used as a differentiation strategy in a way that it could leverage the private hospitals’ performance in the Portuguese market. For this, tree research questions were developed by proposing that hospital branding provided private hospitals with better resource allocation skills, further tools to promote patient satisfaction and improved hospital positioning, when compared with unbranded hospitals. To analyze this, a 2-group sample was defined, with both branded and unbranded Portuguese private hospitals, and a set of hypotheses was created, supporting all research questions, and tested through association’s and differences’ tests. After analysis, not all hypotheses were accepted and, consequently, not all research questions were fully supported. Evidence showed that hospital branding did provide private hospitals with a higher chance of offering more resources to patients, with a higher clinical excellence and safety than unbranded hospitals. Branded hospitals were expected to be more innovative regarding used technologies and more likely to present a transparent culture with patients.

Date of Award	9 Mar 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Maria Inês dos Santos Mendonça Padre Eterno (Supervisor)