INSIGHT REPORT TEAM 9 E-Concept Development Semester 2, Project 1A Group 5 - Cage’s Angels 12.09.2014
THE
TEAM Hanna Ella Sandvik
Katariina Pertola
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Jakob Vestergaard
hannaellasandvik@gmail.com
mistrunner.jv@gmail.com
I am 25 and I am Danish/Norwegian. I am currently working for the Fucking Flink movement - making the world a better place one flink at a time. I have had my own company, Hanna Ella Grafisk Design since 2012.
I’m a graduated Multimedia Designer from the Business Academy of Aarhus. With about 2 years of company experience, I’ve been part of several projects and even worked as design manager on a few.
Philip Schlenzig
Sandra Molin
kattyish@gmail.com
p_play@hotmail.com
smolion@hotmail.com
I’m 23 and originally from Finland, but I have lived all around Europe over the years. I’ve worked in advertising and graphic design since 2010 and currently work as the Art Director for a festival in Copenhagen.
I’m 23, working at a recruitment agency, I enjoy abstract design, have a big interest in business Marketing and behavior psychology.
I’m danish and 25 years old. I studied Business / Design at KEA Landskronagade before I started E-concept. I currently work at Irma.dk and do all kinds of fun things (not really). I love music and TV series.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS The Team............................................1 Table of Contents..............................2 Introduction.......................................3 Client Goal.........................................4 Problem Area.....................................4 Problem Formulation........................4 Hypotheses........................................4 Constraints........................................4 Methodology......................................5 Analysis.............................................6 Desktop Research......................6 PESTEL......................................7 Targeting.....................................9 Channeling................................11 Conclusion.......................................12 Appendix 1.......................................13
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INTRODUCTION
Proventi is a team made up of a variety of physicians, nurses and aestheticians all with different specialization, currently within bariatric and metabolic surgery. The company provides an on-site educational service for hospitals that wish to either start practicing within Proventi’s fields or upgrade/extend their knowledge of this, if it already exists locally. The company itself is young but combined the physicians have more than 100 years of experience.
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“Proventi is your total surgical solutions provider for bariatric and metabolic surgery.”
The Proventi Product Proventi sells an educational product to hospitals specifically tailored to the individual hospital’s needs and wishes. However, the “production line” of this education product has the same expected storyline. Right now the company works only externally through networking and proactive interpersonal approach, but after the sell the Proventi product storyline is as follows:
According to Proventi themselves, their target group consists mainly of senior, experienced hospital executives - probably with a past in surgery themselves. The company currently has one client hospital in Saudi Arabia and the contact to this hospital was made through private networking. When asked about what potential markets Proventi sees themselves in, they mention the BRIC-countries and countries with obvious lifestyle related diseases. When asked about their plans for future adding on surgical fields of expertise in order to expand their services, they mention cardiovascular and pulmonary surgery.
When the product has been “sold” to the client, Proventi finds the surgeons needed. Internally every specialist has a go-to team that has a special added value of a long mutual working history. These teams are assembled and brought on-site of the individual hospital in question. The teams work autonomously - specialist to specialist. This means that the Proventi aesthetician teaches the local aesthetician, the nurses educate the nurses and so on. First off, the local hospital staff has an observing role, in the next step they handed over the acting role as Proventi observes. In the latter period Proventi assess when the local hospital is ready to terminate their on-site presence.
For the foreseeable future the company will continue to focus on lifestyle related illnesses in particular those related to overweight.
Once Proventi has left the hospital physically, the company offers offsite support and consulting.
Client Goal As stated at the Client Brief (08.09.2014), Proventi currently has one customer, but want to expand their services to other hospitals. Where these hospitals are located or how the company can requisite these is the subject of the problem area:
Problem Area Proventi was established hurriedly because the founder realized there was a market very few other companies were tending to. Because of this, branding efforts were neglected. This makes Proventi a market shareholder without a clear communicative strategy and brand identity. Proventi is in a position where they want to expand beyond their first client into any lucrative market and for this they need a clear profile both aesthetically and communicatively.
Problem Formulation How can we establish a clear and professional communication strategy for Proventi, herein including visual identity, choice of media channels and level of linguistic intricacy, to further establish their position in the market of education within their field of expertise? Sub-formulations:
- Which media channels do the target audience use and what are the possibilities of creating a presence in those for Proventi? - Which national markets are interesting for Proventi and what parameters make them lucrative? - As Proventi desires to keep their Nordic background in their visual identity, how do we still communicate efficiently to countries which differs in cultural background visually and technologically? - Should Proventi´s strategy focus on cross-national, national, or even regional media outlets as their go-to-market platform? - How do we keep the visual identity of the website consistent with the brand communicated through all media channels?
Hypotheses Our hypotheses is that it’s probably better to look at places that have an overweight of private health-care hospitals because they have more incentive to compete on quality. We also hypothesise that private hospitals will have an easier time allocating money for additional education of staff because of a lower level of bureaucracy than publicly funded hospitals where these decisions will be more likely to be affected by political forces. Yet we hypothesise that there needs to be other factors involved to make a potential market, and even though Saudi Arabia is not immediately a country we consider statistically “fat”, we expect potential markets to statistically have a certain degree of national/regional obesity and a societal group with interest in the surgery with high enough income to make use of private hospitals. We hypothesise that these 3 factors correlated will show a gold ore of opportunity for Proventi.
Constraints - All text must be in English. Because of Arabic being a right-to-left read language, Proventi feels that this will affect the “Nordic” feel of their visuals - The visual identity and information architecture must stay loyal to Nordic style. Proventi defines “Nordic” as simple and light - A backend needs to be added at some point on the website, so room/ suggestion for a button must be left for that when redesigning
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METHODOLOGY Desktop Research Although Desktop Research does not usually entail researching quantifiable data alone, our focus for this Insight Report was primarily that. Our research sought to uncover which markets could potentially be interesting for Proventi - this overview seemed easiest achieved by gaining access to qualified data on the 3 parameters described in the hypothesis: Private healthcare frequency, obesity statistics and disposable income. We arbitrarily chose to include the top 40 countries in each statistic to limit the amount of data to correlate. We also only included countries with a population over 1 million. We also understand that some of the correlations we find may be exactly that: Correlations with no actual causal relation and hence no real potential market. We also understand, that by limiting the research to only 3 parameters we might be missing one or more interesting parameters. This decision was again made on the basis of the vast amount of data in varying quality - the data that is collectable within these 3 parameters are possible to get from highly regarded analyses institutes and databanks such as the UN, Gallup and OECD. This also played into our choosing of these parameters - that they are observable in places with high validity, since we don’t have resources to create them ourselves. Overall we have made an effort to find the newest sets of data, the most peerreviewed data and investigated the actual source of this data in order to insure a the validity of our own conclusions.
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PESTEL In order to investigate whether these parameters were also present in the first country that Proventi actually went into and to discover if there were other parameters we had to look into, we have made a PESTEL macroanalysis of the external factors in the market as is. We essentially do this to either prove or disprove the hypothesis that the 3 chosen parameters actually makes up a good market and if not - then what other parameters are important to look at.
LIX We have included a LIX-count analysis in other to quantitatively investigate the levels of Proventi’s current texts and other texts in the field. We chose to do this because LIX is an easy way to evaluate linguistic intricacy of many texts and as the result is comparable, it is easier to find the right level for the target audience. We assume that the targeted doctors read one or more of the chosen magazines from where we have taken text. We understand that LIX is merely one way of analysing texts and that for an example the length of a word is not always a sign of intricacy, as intricacy can also be seen as certain LSP (Language for specific purposes) - that makes words hard to comprehend regardless of their length. With all of this in mind, we still thought, that it would give us useful data for the further work on creating the concept.
Targeting We use all of the above mentioned methodologies to form a basis of qualified segmentation that can eventually lead to the choosing of a specific target group - the specific regions and hospitals in those regions we want to aim our future concept towards.
Desktop Research Obesity in the world It is public knowledge, these days, that the world is getting fatter and science is backing up the general idea of the public. In 2007, Forbes released their list of ‘World’s Fattest Countries’1. The countries are listed depending on how many percent of the population are at or above a BMI of 25. This list clearly shows that, in no less than 88 countries, over 50% of the population are considered overweight. And in those 88 countries, we find some of the usual suspects - United States (9th place), United Kingdom (28th place) and Germany (43rd place). What is interesting and, perhaps, surprising is the amount of developing and Middle Eastern countries found on the list - not places commonly associated with obesity. Kuwait ranks 8th, above the US. And Saudi Arabia is at 29th place, just below the UK. And according to The Atlantic2 and The Lancet3, two-thirds of all obese people now live in developing countries. Lifestyle diseases are no longer something reserved for the upper- and upper-middle class of society. As fast-food chains have spread and the price on food have gone down, it has become easier for middle class people to buy and eat unhealthy foods - or just copious amounts of food. Proventi in Saudi Arabia The first deal that Proventi has made is in Saudi Arabia, which, as mentioned above, is among the 30 “fattest” countries in the world. By 2007, the percentage of overweight people in the country, was at 63.5% and if the numbers follow the common rise in obesity it is fair to assume 1 “World’s Fattest Countries” by Lauren Streib, 08/02/2007. Available at: <http://www.forbes. com/2007/02/07/worlds-fattest-countries-forbeslife-cx_ls_0208worldfat.html> 2 “Two-Thirds of Obese People Now Live in Developing Countries” by Uri Friedman, 29/05/2014. Available at: <http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/two-thirds-ofthe-worlds-obese-people-now-live-in-developing-countries/371834/> 3 “Global, regional, and national prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and adults during 1980—2013” by The Lancet (and a LOT of people), 29/05/2014. Available at: <http://www. thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2814%2960460-8/fulltext>
ANALYSIS
that this number has only increased since. A possible cause of this high number of overweight inhabitants, might be the increase of fast food chains and an improved ease for buying said fast food4. What’s interesting for Proventi is the healthcare system in place in Saudi Arabia. It’s mainly a public health system, yet there is a focus on increasing the role that the private sector plays, in the public healthcare system5. It can be expected that privately owned hospitals/clinics are more inclined to better educate their staff, in order to stay competitive within the market. As Proventi is already in business with a Saudi Arabian hospital, we can conclude that the above conditions (an increase in obesity, within the population and a growing/large private healthcare sector) are good foundations for finding similar market opportunities.
4 “Fast food in Saudi Arabia” by Euromonitor International, Jan 2014. Available at: <http:// www.euromonitor.com/fast-food-in-saudi-arabia/report> 5 “Healthcare in Saudi Arabia” by The Economist, 27/01/2014. Available at: <http://www. economistinsights.com/healthcare/analysis/healthcare-saudi-arabia>
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Political
Economic
P1. Political instability in developing countries P2. Changes in demographics P3. Political good-will P4. Corruption
EC1. Countries with public SC1. Increased/dehealth care vs. countries creased quality of life with private health care SC2. Society becoming more accepting of obesity (e.g. the “Fat Acceptance” and “Health At Every Size (HAES)” movements in U.S.)
Technological T1. Equipment at hospitals T2. AspireAssist and other emerging alternatives to bariatric/metabolic surgeries
Social and Cultural
Environmental
Legal
E1. Transportation of doctors and equipment
L1. Healthcare & working laws of countries
PESTEL We used the PESTEL analysis to get an overview of the most important external factors that can affect Proventi’s business. The political field highlights the unstable state of developing countries. Although many countries in the Arab world actually has a stable political government themselves, they are vulnerable to regional conflicts and some have very clear political allegiances. Denmark’s international involvement and national politics can jeopardise Proventi’s work as Danish products have before been subjects to boycotts in the Arab region and this still affects Danish businesses in that region1.
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both spending on health care and the rise in obesity. The level of this change is pivotal - are standards too good already, Proventi’s work might be superfluous because the standards are already high. A gap in standards and rising demographics is Proventi’s sweet spot and luckily there are many countries with rising economies to look into. Political good-will and corruption forms a general sign of the intricacy of the political structures. In many of the countries we are looking into, they either have a history of very strict governance or are still to some extent affected by it3. This means it can be important to look at additional costs in cases of corruption and to gain good will from political forces. In all cases, it is hard to see Proventi act completely autonomous with the hospitals in developing countries - even if they are privately owned as political control is enforced more frequently in developing countries. One of the most important questions we have considered throughout the project comes to term in the economic field. The difference between privatized and public healthcare is huge when it comes to Proventi’s business model, as the greatest profit undoubtedly lies in the private hospitals which have more resources and more incentive to compete with each other over quality of service, whereas hospitals under public healthcare rely on government funds and the governmental bureaucracy that comes with this. This can also be linked to the political aspect of the PESTEL analysis as depending on the government of a country, bariatric and metabolic surgeries may not be at the top of the list when it comes to most important health procedures to focus funding on. This again supports the idea, that economy and changes in demographics play an important part when it comes to these potential markets.
The changes in demographics however are working to Proventi’s advantage as a bigger middle and upper class2 are good indicators for
In the social and cultural field we can see a threat currently rising in the United States and slowly starting to show in many other countries as well. The Fat Acceptance and HAES movements have been gaining supporters at exponential rates in the recent years4 which means more and more people are becoming more accepting of excess weight and
1 http://faculty.georgetown.edu/aa658/research_files/Antoniades%20Danish%20Cartoons%20 and%20Muslim%20Outcry.pdf 2 http://www.oecd.org/dev/44457738.pdf
3 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1514076## 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_at_Every_Size, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_acceptance_movement#Third_wave
obesity. As these movements grow larger they are beginning to spread to other countries as well, and therefore pose a threat to the weight loss industry as a whole as the movements discourage everything ranging from dieting to weight loss surgeries. Depending on the progress of FA and HAES, some geographical locations may become unprofitable for companies like Proventi due to negative attitudes towards weight loss. However, there will still be health concerns in spite of more cultural acceptance of obesity. This means that these countries may have a market for the more permissive surgeries like pulmonary surgery rather than the still relatively preemptive bariatric field. Moving on to the technological aspect, the most prominent factor is the equipment and supplies in the hospitals. Since Proventi’s services include setting up the necessary facilities in hospitals, it is essential to stay up to date with the newest technology in the field and there needs to be a presence of infrastructure in the region to supply the demand after Proventi leaves. All of this again relates to the economic factors of the region. Another technological aspect to consider is the threat of emerging alternatives to weight loss surgeries. As technology and modern medicine advances it is inevitable that new, more attractive methods will arise. A good example of this is the AspireAssist5, which claims to help with weight loss through a much less intrusive, less expensive and less complicated procedure compared to bariatric surgeries.
Lastly, the external factor that may affect Proventi directly is the legal issues that they may face, especially when looking to expand their services to new countries and areas. In cases of bigger welfare state constructions public hospitals are usually required to put any external expenditure up for public offering - essentially private companies compete for the task at hand to get the job. The costs of putting in such an offer can be high. The amounts of red tape and costs related to it makes welfare states a hard market to enter for Proventi. In some states medicine and surgery are subject to copious amounts of legislation regarding allowed procedures, medicine or equipment. Not to say that Proventi should have a strategy to go for completely unregulated markets, but it is worth noting, that if certain procedures, their preferred use of anesthetics or even scalpels could have a huge impact on the Proventi business model as it is based on years of expertise with a set group of staff that would need re-training in order to educate under local conditions.
The environmental section highlights how Proventi’s business model of “flying” physicians has an environmental impact as it is based on transporting physicians and equipment around the world. This poses an issue linking to the political section if governments and health officials place enough importance on the environment and choose services locally instead. Proventi’s current logo very much underlines the fact that the company provides “flying doctors” - these things may impact the potential host countries or CSR-efforts of the individual hospital.
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Available at: <http://aspirebariatrics.com/>
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TARGETING
See APPENDIX 1 for the full color-coded list of countries. Ideal Group The first group fulfills all the parameters and is to be the best group of countries for Proventi to target because they have a high income, high use of private hospitals and a high rate of obesity according to our hypothesis. The blue group The blue group is countries with a high income and a high rate of obesity among the population. This group could still become a part of Proventiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s target audience because they have a healthy economy and they have possible clients to get bariatric surgery.
Quantitative Study of Parameters In this study we took a look at three different parameters to find the best possible target audience for Proventi. First we found the 40 countries with the highest rate of obesity1, then we found 40 countries with the highest income2 and at last we found the countries that have the highest expenditure regarding private hospitals3 (The private expenditure on health as a percentage of total expenditure on health). All countries included in the parameters have a population over 1 million. After we found the needed data we divided the data into groups. One group contained all three parameters and the rest of the groups contained two of the given parameters. 1 http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/07/worlds-fattest-countries-forbeslife-cx_ls_0208worldfat. html 2 http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Cost-of-living/Average-monthly-disposable-salary/After-taxhttp://gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/Files/Maps/Private_2012.png 3 http://gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/Files/Maps/Private_2012.png
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The green group The green group represent countries with a high rate of obesity and high use if private hospitals. This is all countries with a lower income, but they still have available private hospitals that could be targeted. This could mean that even though median disposable income is low, there are still groups of people with high enough income to make use of private health care. This can be a sign that the incomes might be very disparate in these countries. The purple group The purple group contain countries with a high income and a high use of private hospitals. Although this group contain countries that we did not list as obese they could still have regions where obesity is a big problem. In these countries it would probably be better to go for a more regional approach. When doing the final targeting we should take into consideration that some hospitals already have full functioning bariatric facilities or even experts in this specific field of medicine. This might limit the need for Proventi and therefore lower the demand of Proventiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s service at those specific hospitals.
story shows up locally, this can affect Proventi’s further mobility within the country. Even though public health may seem like a big market at first, in a public system an agreement with one strong stakeholder, will not necessarily include orders for all public hospitals, rather single ones that solely hold the national competence of say obesity or sleep deprivation, whereas private hospitals have to have all competences in one location (unless they are part of a chain). It’s important to remember that stakeholders may not have a medical background. Hospital Owners Hospital owners are interesting as a target group because they differ greatly. In the US the market is dominated by Hospital Corporation of America, so even though the hospitals are private, the market is dominated by a monopoly - but instead of the monopoly holder being the government, it is a private company. Hospital owners of big corporations don’t necessarily have a medical background.
Targeting
Hospital Executives Proventi mentions themselves that the executives are usually a bit old - this is an effect of the executives often being physicians themselves before advancing into a leadership role. If this is the case, it is possible to contact this target group through medical jargon. Their level of education is very high and their English is to be expected to be good.
Stakeholders Even though we are looking at countries with higher frequencies of private healthcare, we still need to look at key stakeholders and when doing so, it is impossible to avoid politicians and the local minister of health. As these people’s involvement takes a lot of time and paper work, the best strategy to really keep them happy, is to keep out of their way. Proventi should probably consider a strategy where the local hospitals are solely responsible for all things involving politics and besides that have a clear strategy for crisis communication. In the case a bad
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CHANNELING
Magazines - Infomedix (Infomedix International is a B2B magazine, especially designed for the medical trade and industry) à Available North and Latin America; Europe and Africa; Middle East and Asia. Global readership of 35,000 contacts in the medical trade and industry in 162 countries. - Forbes Middle East Published by Arab Publisher House. (LixCount: 46)
Analysis of Linguistic Intricacy To reach Proventi’s the target group of hospital executives, we found 2 channels, which we believe are suitable to take use of, to pragmatically promote their company worldwide and create a significant interest for Proventi’s services. By using a text analysis on Proventi’s website as well on the 2 media channels we found, we can conclude that they are compatible in the sense of having the same level of academic language. To conclude that they are compatible, we used a LIX analysis1 to analyze the characteristics and difference in the 3 subjects (Proventi’s website, Infomedix, and Conference website) to determine if the LIX count are more or less the same. Websites - Proventi website’s average - LIX count: 64 - Infomedix medical magazine - LIX count: 64 - 10times world medical conferces - LIX Count:59 1
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Lixtal beregner - Niels Gamborg http://www.nielsgamborg.dk/indhold/lixberegner.htm
- Health Journal B2C, published by Gulf Medical College. (LixCount: 48) From our text analysis we found that the LIX count on Proventi’s website is very high, which means that the language used throughout the website has a academic textual level of content - in regards to every other target group than the one of Hospital Executives, it needs to be addressed. This can cause potential clients to discard the company’s offer, because they don’t understand exactly what Proventi’s product is. To make sure that all future clients understand and have clear readability of Proventi’s website, it’s of most importance that the clients user experience is prioritised, by focusing on adjusting the LIX count number to their level of competence. This can be done by either differentiating the communication or finding a way for making the information understandable by both laymen and trained professional without anyone misunderstanding or feeling talked down to.
Conclusion It is clear that there are many parameters to choose from when deciding on markets for Proventi to engage with, but overall it seems that there are better chances with private institutions or at least public institutions that operate in a highly competitive market. The income parameter may not have been as important as first anticipated, but it does give a good background for making a cost/benefit analysis on whether the market is worth trying to get into. The less disparate the income levels and the bigger a middle class the country has, it makes for both current and future possibilities within that country. It seems that statistically obesity is an important factor, however it will be interesting for Proventi to look into regional markets where obesity is more common. We expect these regions to primarily be urban areas, but we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have any information to back up this claim at the end of this current report. We will look more into these countries when we look at the concept itself.
CONCLUSION
It is clear that Proventi needs two major communication strategies: One for crisis communication because the subject of their field is highly politicised and hence subject for public interest and judgement both locally and internationally. The brand needs to know how to act in different thought-of examples of shitstorms. The second communication strategy needs to address the intricacy of their written materials - be it their website or wherever else they want to communicate. The company needs to be aware that their current texts are almost impossible for a laymen to understand. As many stakeholders and part of their target group may be exactly that: Laymen, the company has to consider how to solve that task.
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APPENDIX 1
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