The Impact of Marketing Mix Elements on Brand Loyalty towards Speech Therapy in Health Science Industry Malaysia

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 has 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 (CRM) and Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) with brand loyalty in speech therapy industry in Malaysia.