병원선택속성에 관한 소비자 인지구조 연구-수단-목적 사슬이론과 래더링을 중심으로-

As the competition among hospitals become intensified, hospital management is required to carry out more effective marketing and segmentation and positioning of the hospital. Successful positioning of a hospital requires the knowledge about how the concrete attributes inherent in the medical service associated with the customer values that customers seek eventually in the medical service. Thus, it is required for hospital management to understand which hospital attributes should be emphasized in order to improve the customer values. How to assess consumer knowledge and cognitive structures, the means - end chain theory and laddering of the qualitative research methods are applied. To obtain such knowledge, this study applies the APT matrix for simultaneously identifying the customer values. This research examined the underlying causal relationship and value chains of hospital selection attributes. We carried out the surveys both on-line and off-line survey for data analysis. The result suggests that hospital management had better increase the scale of hospital, improve the services of health care providers, and modernize the hospital facilities and equipments so as to enhance customer values and eventually to lead them to recommend the hospital to others. Our findings would provide the valuable information for hospital management to develop the more effective hospital positioning and marketing strategies.