Food-Service-Manual-for-Health-Care-Institutions

Food Service Manual for Health Care Institutions
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• Implementation: dealing with change, employee training, advertising and promotion
• Evaluation: monitoring and measuring marketing outcome
• Feedback: reporting successes, failures, or both, and returning to the information phase
Key Marketing Concepts
Although relatively new to the health care field, marketing is a discipline of sophisticated and
proven theories, techniques, and concepts. Although a complete discussion of these areas is
beyond the scope of this book, it is critical that managers in health care food service be familiar
with at least three of the concepts: services marketing, markets and segmentation, and marketing
mix.
Services Marketing
Since the early 1980s, the service sector of the nation’s economy has grown at an astounding
rate. According to the Bureau of the Census, this sector, of which the health care field is a member,
accounts for more than 50 percent of both the gross domestic product and consumer
expenditures. Despite the importance of the service sector, only recently has services marketing
been differentiated from goods marketing. Marketing techniques originally developed to sell
goods are not always appropriate for selling services.
Goods Versus Services
Before services marketing is examined, the distinction between goods and services must be
understood. Goods may be objects, devices, or things; when goods are purchased, something
tangible is acquired for possession. Services, on the other hand, are mostly intangible; a service
is an activity performed for the benefit of a purchaser. A service often is transacted on a personal
basis and usually does not result in ownership (possession) of a physical (or tangible)
item. A service is created by its provider; for example, a facility that employs a meal hostess to
deliver patient trays or a chef to carve roasted meat on a cafeteria line is a service provider.
Most health care food service operations probably deliver a combination of goods and
services. In such operations, acquisition of goods and supplies, preparation and service of
meals, and cleanup afterward are performed for patients by food service employees. Hence,
health care food service is considered an industry—a service industry—even though tangibles
(food and equipment) are involved.
Characteristics of Services
Although service industries themselves are heterogeneous (ranging from barber shops to health
care operations), certain generalizations can be made about the characteristics of services. The
most important of these characteristics are intangibility, simultaneous production and consumption,
less uniformity and standardization, and absence of inventories.
Intangibility
Services provided by health care food service operations are consumed but not possessed. What
is being bought is a performance of an activity rendered by a food service employee or group of
employees for the benefit of a customer. Generally, the provision of services is a people-intensive
process. To the patient, the meal hostess’s delivery of the breakfast tray is as much a part of the
meal as the tangible portion, the food.
Simultaneous Production and Consumption
Goods are generally produced, sold, and then consumed, with much emphasis placed on distributing
goods at the “right place” and at the “right time.” Services are produced and consumed