How to Market Your Equine Practice: Focus on Service Quality

1. Introduction
Equine practitioners perform marketing tasks every day in their practice, although very few of them use formal tools available from the field of services marketing. The goal of this presentation is to provide an overview of marketing with a specific emphasis in services marketing, introduce some marketing tools, and show the usefulness of formal marketing efforts in practice. Modern equine practice presents many veterinary medical diagnostic challenges; as practitioners, we have met those challenges by acquiring the knowledge and equipment to stay current. The study of services marketing will provide powerful tools to practitioners hoping to diagnose and improve their business’s health.

When many practitioners hear marketing, they immediately think of advertising, and some have negative impressions of advertising in veterinary medicine. The traditional marketing mix was developed for product marketing and consists of the four Ps: product, price, promotion, and place.^1,2  Of the four Ps, notice that only one part of the marketing mix includes advertising (promotion). Also notice that promotional efforts include more than just advertising. The promotional mix includes advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, publicity, and public relations. [...]