Managerial Marketing

Incontinence Is a Hard Sell

There are people in the United States of America that live with incontinence. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality performed a study that revealed 13 million people live with incontinence for any number of reasons and not just related to age. (Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, 1996) The people who suffer from incontinence deserve to live normal lives. They need to have products that will protect their skin, avoid embarrassing situations, and be cost effective. Incontinence is a symptom of other disease people live with this situation on a daily basis. This is a market oriented product in which the consumer’s needs are a concern for marketing the product line appropriately. The steps to the exchange relationship need to be analyzed and followed through.

The initial step to developing an exchange relationship is to determine the customer. The incontinence product line has numerous customers. The person who is incontinent and the caregiver is the ultimate customer as defined by Mullins and Walker because they, “…buy goods and services for their own personal use or the use of others in their immediate household.” (Mullins & Walker, 2010, p. 7) Incontinent care products can also have organizational customers because they can provide products to hospitals and nursing homes, as Mullins and Walker explains “…for use in the day-to-day operations of the organization…” (Mullins & Walker, 2010, p. 7) The product is conducive to both customer types making it more marketable and profitable in the long run do to the broader range of customer base. The marketing organization would benefit from creating a market segment for each of these customer bases. Mullins and Walker describe market segments as, “…distinct subsets of people with similar needs, circumstances, and characteristics that lead them to respond in a similar way to a particular product or service offering or to a particular strategic marketing program.”...