while it is passionately pushing ahead the ‘brand’ envelope, does it stand the danger of falling off the ledge? By Steven Philip Warner

Fiction mirrors many truths in a myriad of fashions that meet the eye, one of which is found in the field of the healthcare business. A staunch believer in this legitimate fact is Sudarshan Mazumdar, Director of Marketing & CMO, Fortis Healthcare Group, who boldly puts it as, “Healthcare is just like any other form of service. The problem is that the medical community in the past has not been used to considering healthcare marketing, and while they want to sell themselves, they don’t admit that they want to be marketed! All they do is comment upon what is ethical, and what is not… Then there are strict guidelines about what you can talk about and what you can’t talk!” Indeed, and while many lament over the truth that 80% of India still survives on earnings below $2 a day (source: UNDP), there is a lot to be had from the ‘rich’ few and another 300 million strong middle-class lot. Today, hospital chains in the country have easily established themselves superior to many of their counterparts in the West, and while many still give out the clichéd talk about ‘We have the best doctors in town’, the Fortis-Escorts combine are proving what Indian hospitals have to undertake if they are to take advantage of the Indian healthcare industry, which is scheduled to touch $75 billion by 2012 and a double $150 billion by 2017 (Report titled ‘Indian Healthcare Trends 2008’, Technopak Advisors) – market yourself fearlessly!

Having realised the massive earnings potential from the sector, Fortis has made remarkable strides in the past four and half years in the area of selling itself to the market as Mazumdar confesses, “I’ve been with Fortis since April 2004, and the company is very different today than what it was.” Then, except in Punjab, the brand was completely unknown as Mazumdar puts it as, “In five years, we’ve grown dramatically both as a company and as a brand. Doctors are important, but the hospital brand is more important than an individual doctor and that is the principal guideline that we have followed all along.” As a company, Fortis has grown from two to 39 hospitals (including the Wockhardt assets that it acquired during the second half of August), which Mazumdar says will take “until December 2009, by the time the acquisition is formally made complete and Fortis moves in.” That means a growth of 1,900% in terms of presence across the country in just half-a-decade.

Then comes the question – what about the Fortis brand? When put in a sentence, branding campaigns as recent as pre-2008 were literally unknown for the 9,000-strong employees at Fortis. But since last year, there have been aggressive marketing attempts from the group; the most recent of those being the ‘Human Touch’ campaign that was launched in August 2009. Talking about the essence behind the recent campaign, Mazumdar claims, “It is very different. It is based on market research, training of personnel and about keeping the patients first. At the end of the day, it’s all about patient care. The earlier model of hospital designs was that it was centered around the doctors and the patients would be moving. We have minimised the movement of the patients, but we don’t mind the doctors moving…”

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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