Value creation in Health Services

What is value, where does it come from, and how can it be created

Value creation in health services: what is value, where does it come from, and how can it be created in social marketing preventative health services?

This seminar explores value creation in services and discusses the role of value in social marketing in order to encourage sustained, positive behaviours in target audiences. Social marketing and public health strategies encourage individuals to engage in self-care behaviours to improve their personal health and wellbeing. However, health customers are often viewed as passive recipients of these services (Holman and Lorig, 2000). Outside of health, there is a growing body of literature that suggests healthcare clients are active participants and creators of value along with firms, stakeholders, and others (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2012; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004; Vargo and Lusch, 2004). Guided by services thinking (Zainuddin, 2013), a form of mid-stream social marketing (Russell-Bennett et al., 2013), this study investigates the value creation process in social marketing and introduces the ideas of value co-creation and value self-creation. Results from an initial qualitative, exploratory study were used to develop a model of value creation in social marketing. This was subsequently tested in two large-scale quantitative studies and the results were analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) in AMOS. The findings provide important contributions to health care service providers, social marketing practitioners, and theory.