Competitor analysis in medical tourism

The concept is now well established in financial services and industry in general. But is it adopted in medical tourism?

If you ask medical tourism organizations what they do on competitor analysis, my guess is that many will just reply that, of course, they kept an eye on what others were doing.

Until a business has defined who its competitors are and set up a system that enables you to get a feel of how you compare now, and whether you are ahead of or behind trend, you cannot claim to be doing real competitor analysis.

Who are your competitors?

If your response is: ‘Everybody else in medical tourism’, you need to think again.

Whether you are a country, city, clinic or agency, you should know very clearly who else is also targeting your customers.

Of course, before this, you need to know who your actual or potential customers are by nationality, location, social group, ethnicity, treatment types, low/medium/high price, seasonality etc. And there is a difference between actual customers and potential customers.

So you need to identify your key customer bases and/or key potential customer bases.

You then need to find out who your actual competitors are. This may be by name, by group or even by country.

One way is to identify 12 to 20 competitors, but leave a blank so you can add in others who come out of the woodwork later.

Creating and using a benchmark

Exactly what you do and how you do it depends on what type of organization you are.

You set out your key offerings by type, extras, price and customer. To compare prices you may need to convert to Euros or dollars.

Use of the benchmark can be ongoing, monthly or quarterly.

What you need is a system so that you can compare what your key competitors do, against what you do, and identify how that is changing.

Some argue that this can be numerical, but I disagree, as to get a feel of trends it has to include soft and hard business elements; so, not just the price of heart surgery, but what a hospital does to help the patient and family before, during and after the operation.

Choosing information

One reason for keeping key competitor numbers small, and areas to benchmark limited, is that information, some of it of dubious accuracy, can quickly swamp the analysis and you lose focus.

So you need to identify what information you need to monitor, but with a flexibility that enables you to spot things that your competitors add that could affect you, and to spot new danger key competitors.

The information

The hardest trick in medical tourism is identifying real information from false, misleading or simply out of date information. When you read information, is there an obvious spin from the company or person supplying that information that helps them sell their services or conferences?

You need to regularly monitor media, online media, social media and competitor websites.

What you are looking for

What you are after is information that tells you where competitors are getting business that perhaps you could have had, by offering services or using marketing that gives them an edge. You are also looking to see what you do that competitors do not, so that this can be highlighted in your advertising and marketing.

Also, you are looking for trends, either good or bad in what customers want, or where they come from, or why they seek what they seek.

Keep it legal

If you look for and use information in the public domain and keep that information internal, you are legal. If you then try to use that comparison information in marketing or advertising, there are many grey areas and you have to be able to not only prove any comparison statement but be prepared to explain when and where it came from.

In getting information, getting people to pretend to be customers to find out what a competitor is doing used to be common and accepted. Mystery shopping for an organization by that organization, or by a consumer group or newspaper is generally acceptable, but mystery shopping by an organization on a competitor has become a dangerous area because it involves deception.

If you pay anybody in or who used to be in, or connected with a competitor organization for information, in many countries this is a problem under civil and or criminal law relating to bribery, fraud, theft, collusion and data protection.

Advantages

The biggest advantage of competitor analysis is that to do it at all, you first have to focus on what most medical tourism organizations do not, in finding out what your key offerings are, who your key customers are, and your key competitors.

Done properly, competitor analysis can help you quickly spot risks to your business and new opportunities.

And finally…

Apologies to any of you who carry out or understand competitor analysis for all I have left out. This basic primer is equivalent to ‘explaining quantum physics in four paragraphs’ !