A Study on Customer Loyalty and Word-of-Mouth Effect according to Character Trait of Patient in Dental Clinics

Abstract

Recently in the dental world, competition in the medical industry has been intensified due to the prolonged economic stagnation, the quantitative expansion of medical institutions, the enhancement of medical consumers'awareness of rights, and the diversity of medical consumer needs. Dental institution management of the difficulties is the requirement for dental institution to ensure competitiveness. So Word-of-Mouth marketing, which creates high marketing effectiveness with low cost, needs to be actively utilized as a new alternative to mass communication marketing. This research is to accurately grasp the target group of dental medical marketing activities through research on the degree of customer loyalty and Word-of-Mouth effects according to character trait of the patients visiting dental clinics, and to present the basic data for Word-of-Mouth marketing strategies from a viewpoint of practical business through presenting Word-of-Mouth promotion factors. To achieve this, questionnaire survey was conducted on 10 dental clinics located in Daegu for 4 weeks from April 11, 2011 to May 6, 2011 and 612 copies of responses to the questionnaires for final data for analysis were obtained. The results of the analysis are as follows. There were no significant differences in the degree of customer loyalty according to character trait of the subjects between the introverts and the extroverts, and the subjects with high market mavens propensity were found to show high degree of customer loyalty (F=5.243, p=.006). In the differences in Word-of-Mouth effectiveness according to character trait, there were greater differences in Word-of-Mouth experiences in the extrovert subjects (χ 2 =6.738, p=.006) and the subjects with high market mavens propensity (χ 2 =17.251, p=.000). The results of this research clarifies the degree of customer loyalty according to character trait of the patients visiting dental clinics and the differentiated influences of Word-of-Mouth effectiveness, and through this, they will become basic data for presenting ways to establish strategies from the viewpoint of practical business that should be considered in establishing dental medical marketing strategies.

Relevance between Marketing Route of Social Media and Consumer Age Group for Choosing Dental Clinics

“…Advances of information technology (IT) in recent years have made is easy to for the public to acquire information about healthcare and healthcare facilities 12) .…”