The Impact of Marketing Mix Elements on Brand Loyalty

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The Impact of Marketing Mix Elements on Brand
Loyalty Towards Speech Therapy in Health
Science Industry Malaysia
Masri bin Abdul Lasi, Tan Cheng Man, *
City Graduates School, City University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Email: [e-mail],[e-mail]*
How to cite this paper: Author 1,
Author 2, & Author 3 (2020). Paper
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https://dx.doi.org/10.4236/***.2020.
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Open Access
Abstract
Speech therapy is provided to clients, students or patients,
depending on the setting of service delivery, when they are
encountering feeding, speech and language (communication) and
swallowing difficulties. Speech therapy service is a business-to-
consumer (B2C) setting. However, this industry received low public
awareness in Malaysia. With enhanced and right marketing strategy,
it is believed to promote effective brand loyalty, including revisit of
therapy service and repurchase of therapy product. This study aims
to investigate the effectiveness of five different marketing strategies
in building sustainable brand loyalty considering uniqueness of this
industry. The strategies are conducting promotion about pricing
structure (Price Promotion), conducting promotion about product
content, brand personality, packaging and others (Product
Promotion), conducting promotion at different places, including
electronic platforms, newspaper and others (Place Promotion),
bundling different pricing structure according to nature and type of
different products (Product Price), informing customer regarding
pricing about goods bundle, payment method, price flexibility and
others through several distribution channels (Place Price). Data
collection in this quantitative study was done by distributing self-
designed questionnaires to 200 respondents. They are given Likert
scale to measure the degree of brand loyalty result from different
marketing mix. Data was analyzed using SPSS. The findings revealed
that the marketing mix have a positive relationship with brand loyalty
in speech therapy health science industry in Malaysia. In details,
there is relationship between marketing mixture of Price Promotion,
Product Promotion, Place Promotion, Product Price and Place Price,
with the brand loyalty. It is recommended for future researcher to
study the link between the number of service or product accessed
with brand loyalty within similar constructs. It is also recommended
to study the relationship between Customer Relationship Marketing
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Author, Author
(CRM) and Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) with brand
loyalty in speech therapy industry in Malaysia.
Keywords
Brand Loyalty, Health Science Malaysia, Marketing Mix, Speech
Therapy
1. Introduction
Speech therapy is a type of therapy provided to population with
feeding, communication and swallowing difficulties. The population can
be paediatric and adult population. Communication problems can be
categorized into speech problem (pronunciation problem, apraxia,
resonance problem, voice problem, stuttering and others) and
language problem (speech delay, difficult to follow command, difficulty
to understand conversation and others). Swallowing problem can be in
the form of having tube-feeding or alternate method of feeding,
difficulty in swallowing food and/or drink, taking long time to finish a
meal and others. The obligations of Speech Therapist can be differ
depending on the setting of working place. Speech Therapist in
hospital may see more cases with swallowing problem; Speech
Therapist in school may see more cases with expressive language
problem; Speech Therapist in private centre may see more cases with
speech and language delay. Other than providing therapy directly to
clients or patients, Speech Therapist educates public about the role of
Speech Therapist, improves public awareness, trains caregivers,
develops services standards, policies and procedures, and conduct
research.
Speech therapy profession is indeed less known by the public in
Malaysia, hence when graduates search for a job, they choose to
rather be employed by a small company. Being professionally isolated
makes them vulnerable and unable to create impact in the market due
to low public awareness. Speech therapist’s role is to improve feeding,
communication and swallowing skills among paediatric and adult
population. Hence, their workplace can vary, either school, centre or
hospital settings.
Branding is crucial for a company's performance. It improves
demands and directly boosts performance. This works the same for the
health care industry. Speech therapy is one of the Allied Health
Science. In Malaysia, the speech therapy industry is in its infant stage.
There is high demand in Malaysia in fact according to iMoney Learning
Centre (2016)-- there is an approximation of 30,000 children with
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disabilities were registered in Malaysia in 2012.
According to statistics from Malaysian Association of Speech-
Language and Hearing (MASH), in year 2020, in Kuala Lumpur, there
are only 24 speech therapy centres available, highlighting low public
awareness towards this industry. Thus, marketing is definitely required.
Brand loyalty can keep more customers and reduce the customer who
leave (Adel, P., 2015), and associate with self-brand connection and
brand experience (Liezl-Marié, 2017). It directly influences company
performance. Hence, to investigate the impact of marketing mix
element is crucial to provide guidance to speech therapy centre owner
in making a right marketing investment to promote brand loyalty.
With enhanced detection and response towards cue from customer,
centres are more capable to build a quality relationship with customer.
Brand equity is crucial for increasing advertising efficiency and enable
more purchase decision, other than brand differentiation (Nebojsa S.
D., & Piyush S., 2015). With brand loyalty, there would be less brand-
switch behaviour and more customer retention.
As for the scope of past research, the impact of marketing mix
element is only done in mobile phone industry (Raphael, O., 2016,
Jewel, D. N., Abubakar, J., Lucy, A., & Samuel D., 2018, Adel, P., 2015)
and hotel service industry (Sarah, T., Stowe, S., Alexandra, D., 2016).
Limited research has been done to investigate the marketing mix
element in health science industry, specifically speech therapy field.
This restricts speech therapy centre owners in deciding their extent of
marketing expenditure, amount of promotional activities and the
overall marketing mechanism to build brand loyalty.
2.Literature Review
2.1. Relationship between marketing mixture of Price Promotion and
brand loyalty
Speech therapy is provided to clients, students or patients, depending
on the setting of service delivery, when they are encountering feeding,
speech and language (communication) and swallowing difficulties; it is
a business-to-consumer (B2C) setting. Therefore, marketing
practitioner shall understand the customer-brand relationship (CBR)
which involves brand loyalty, and which aspect of marketing to invest
on is much relatively important to ensure a wise marketing investment.
Pricing can be manifested in different forms, such as value-based
(which is depending on the purchaser’s perception on the speech
therapy service offered), can be according to the market
competitiveness and going-rate (for instance, if the market price is at
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standard rate, the pricing would be more or less at that range),
skimming (which targets the affluent clients with families/children
diagnosed with feeding, swallowing and communication problems),
discount, loss-leader (purposefully set the price at a lower price than
the market price in order to attract client crowd) and psychological
(such as put the price at RM99 rather than RM100). Promotion could
directly point out the significance of their advantages and their
respective marketing positions (Hsiu-Ju, C., 2018). To strengthen the
customer relationship with the brand, a promotion can deepen a
client’s memory towards the pricing structure and strategies set by a
speech therapy centre.
Therefore, when promotion emphasizes the availability of early bird
discount or credit term (price delivery), which can relieve purchasers’
financial aspect in the long term, the brand loyalty could be maximized
with the assistance of price promotion.
2.2. Relationship between marketing mixture of Product Promotion
and brand loyalty
In speech therapy industry, product refers to the goods such as speech
therapy handout, magazine, video or other (for sale), and refers to the
service itself such as individual speech therapy and group speech
therapy. The aspect which business owner should pay close attention
in Product marketing is the function of the goods/service—whether the
magazine and therapy can provide a sufficient amount of knowledge to
the population; the appearance and design of the goods/service—
whether the image of the educational video/service can attract the
customer; the overall of goods—whether the bundle or the separate
individual goods/service can fit to certain population.
Therefore, while marketing mix of product promotion place a
special emphasis in the brand personality, which refers to the product
itself, either in terms of value, presentation or mode, this type of
marketing mix may positively affect the brand loyalty.
2.3. Relationship between marketing mixture of Place Promotion and
brand loyalty
The places where promotion takes place affects quality of marketing
and thus brand loyalty. A good promotion place improves the
credibility of the store image and stimulates consumption growth
(Hsiu-Ju, C., 2018). Speech therapy centre sourced continuous referrals
or demand from different settings, hence those places required a
different type of promotion. For instance, hospital would require
feeding difficulty and therapy management information; nursery may
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