Strategic Marketing Plan

Introduction

This section forms the introduction of the Strategic Marketing Plan. A strategic marketing plan .... A marketing communications plan ..

When it comes to marketing the focus is on understanding ones customers, in order to achieve longterm customer satisfaction. Customer needs are the drivers for product development and lead to market opportunities.

There is no marketing mindset within the HL7 organization. This would require that everyone in the organization be aware of who our customers are, what their needs are, and how HL7 can satisfy those needs in a better way than its rivals can.

HL7 has never had a Strategic Marketing Plan. It has however produced materials which inform the process of creating such a plan, or such material can be included as part of such a plan:

1. Product list on the Wiki
2. HL7 Mission statement (defines what our products are, what customer need we're addressing)
3. Strategic Initiatives (provides focus to the mission)
4. Marketing plan 2005
5. Marketing Communications plan (created by HQ)
6. Business plan (currently being written)

Basic marketing questioons

What needs do HL7 product satisfy

Need: timely availability of healthcare data.

• Note that the need is not for 'interoperability standards', which is one of the very many solutions to cover the need. Another solution would be an Airtube System which uses compressed air to ensure availabilty of healthcare data.
• The HL7 mission (see Marketing Plan: Strategic Initiatives) defines the need as: to "improve care delivery, optimize workflow, reduce ambiguity and enhance knowledge transfer among all of our stakeholders, including healthcare providers, government agencies, the vendor community, fellow SDOs and patients".

Customers

Target customers: mainly organizations, not individuals.

1. standards users
2. standards creators (profiler enforcers)

Competition

Competitors are defined as organizations that satisfy the same needs that HL7's products satisfy. Competitors include:

• IHE
• OpenEHR
• HITSP
• Airtube System which uses compressed air
• Data (re-)entry services
• HIS vendors that think of an HIS as an all-encompassing application

Products

Product: (see Marketing Plan: Strategic Initiatives) Interoperability standards.

• At the next level of detail the issue immediately becomes muddy: if we were to ask C**-type people then (at most) they'd provide an answer like: "v2, v3, CDA". We (as HL7) currently don't have a visible product portfolio. The starting point for defining what our products are is to ask our customers to tell us what our products are. We build on that, and try to extend the product portfolio that our customers currently think we have.

Product positioning:

Why should these customers use HL7's products and not one of the competing products?

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