By Dawn Iacobucci, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203, USA, dawn.iacobucci@vanderbilt.edu
This monograph describes the marketing research that has been published in the top marketing journals since their inception relating to health care, broadly defined. Over 1,000 articles are summarized across the chapters relating to consumer behavior and food, consumer behavior and other consumption, and business marketing issues. Research from outside of marketing is also briefly reviewed. This monograph celebrates the research that has been accomplished and closes with suggestions for future research.
A Chronology of Health Care Marketing Research is intended to begin to understand marketing issues in the realm of health care. The primary focus of this monograph is the collection of summaries of marketing research articles reported in chapters 2 to 4, which together represent what is known in academic research at the nexus of marketing and health care. Chapters 2 to 4 do not comprise a traditional literature review but is intended as a chronological overview to serve as a database of synopses of the marketing articles that investigate issues regarding healthcare, offering a resource for scholars wishing to get acquainted with the research that has been conducted to date on a particular healthcare topic of interest. These chapters present the marketing perspective about health care – research that has been conducted by marketers. Chapters 5 and 6 contain research and writings about healthcare by scholars in other disciplines for marketers to showcase complementary points of view. Thus, chapters 2 to 4 should interest marketing academics and practitioners and may also be informative to those outside of marketing who may be unaware of the research that has been conducted in this field. Chapters 5 and 6 report from other fields and disciplines with the primary intention of providing interesting and informative coverage to marketers regarding how others approach some overlapping research topics. The second point of difference is that chapters 2 to 4 offer depth, aiming to be comprehensive in covering that which is known from marketing research in the healthcare arena, whereas chapters 5 and 6 focus on breadth and currency, sampling some representative articles to lend awareness to marketers of research conducted on healthcare issues by scholars from other disciplines.