ASPECTS OF TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT APPLIED IN ...

Annals of the University “Constantin Brâncuşi”of Tg-Jiu, No. 1/2008, Volume 2,
ISSN: 1842-4856
MARKETING'S PECULIARITIES IN HEALTH SERVICES
LECT.UNIV.DR.RABONTU CECILIA IRINA
CONF.UNIV.DR.BONCEA AMELIA
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI UNIVERSITY,TARGU-JIU
ECONOMIC SCIENCES FACULTY
SUMMARY: The present paper has as its purpose to bring in evidence some of the peculiarities of the application
of marketing in the domain of health services, emphasizing the intercessions of the specific organizations initiated at the
microeconomic level, and only tangentially those developed at the macroeconomic level.
For a better understanding of the way in which marketing is applied at the level of those organizations, a
clarification of the health services’ content and of the specific elements that favour or limit the application of some
concepts, methods and marketing techniques is necessary.
The economic-social dynamism determined a continuous extension of the field of action of
marketing, especially beginning with the second half of the XX th century, in all domains and at
different levels of the economic activity and even non-economic, that was accompanied by a
specializing process, namely one of delimitation and adaptation of the concepts, methods and its
techniques.
Among these domains we can also enroll, and successfully, the marketing of services, a
specialization that took place as a result of the outstanding dynamism taking place in the last decades
on the market of services, as well as of the specific characteristics of the services when compared to the
goods. The characteristics of the services determined important changes in the problematic and the
instrumentation of marketing, adapting them to the circumstances in which the carrier out and the
consumer interact during the process of creation and delivery of the service. As a result of the
heterogeneousness of the services, the specializing process of marketing in this domain deepened,
generating new delimitations, so that in the present the touristic marketing, the financial-banking
marketing, the cultural marketing and marketing in the domain of health elicit a great interest.
Meanwhile, beginning with the 70’s, an explosive extension of marketing and the noneconomic
domains took place, an incorporation of its methods and techniques within the framework of
social-natured organizations, the new domain being named SOCIAL MARKETING. The process, in
full progress, of validation and consolidation, is marked by a tendency of specialization, its concrete
application being known by different names : political marketing, electoral marketing, educational
marketing, public health marketing, religious marketing and so on.
No matter the domain in which it finds its applicability, marketing can be defined as: ” a social
and managerial process through which individuals and groups of individuals obtain whatever is
necessary to them and they wish through the manufacturing, offering and change of products having a
certain value." 8 The extensive development of marketing, through the penetration of more and more
domains of activity, was also accompanied by an intensive development, an improvement of the
8 Kotler, Ph. – MARKETING MANAGEMENT, Teora Publishing House, Bucharest, 1998, page 35.
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