In your opinion, has marketing been truly accepted as a necessity for health care organizations yet, or is it still regarded as a luxury?

It is a necessity because of how competitive the industry is, how studies continue to show the continual sharing and publishing of healthcare benefits from given products does lead to interest and trial, and how critical the physician base as a distribution channel is (Joseph, Spake, Finney, 2008). Marketing is also critically important from the standpoint of providing more effective customer success stories and sharing insights as to which products and solutions are also delivering the greatest value (Lee-Wingate, Xie, 2010).

All companies' brands and messaging are predicated on stories of how they serve customers, deliver value, and help to alleviate pain or increase the quality of life. Marketing is the catalyst of all successful storytelling and branding within any industry. Arguably, the more an industry relies on trust as its main means of gaining customer interaction and support for products, the more critical it is to have strong marketing (Joseph, Spake, Finney, 2008). Marketing also can be successfully used for creating successful product introductions, which in any industry is the single largest strategy for revenue generation (Bertolini, Bevilacqua,...

Marketing is also a unifier of selling direction, strategy and product focus, and services program development as well. All of these aspects of marketing permeate a corporation's culture, and must be held together successfully with marketing as a galvanizing thread or catalyst of customer centricity. Anything but a luxury, marketing is a necessity to keep a company focused on what matters most, which is serving customers' needs.
References

Massimo Bertolini, M. Bevilacqua, F.E. Ciarapica, & G. Giacchetta. (2011). Business process re-engineering in healthcare management: a case study. Business Process Management Journal, 17(1), 42-66.

John Hamilton. (2009). Building a targeted pharmacy customer engagement approach. International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, 3(4), 381-396.

Matthew Joseph, Deborah F. Spake, & Zachary Finney. (2008). Consumer attitudes toward pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising: An empirical study and the role of income. International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, 2(2), 117-133.

Sooyeon Nikki Lee-Wingate, & Ying Xie. (2010). Consumer perceptions of product-claim vs. help-seeking direct-to-consumer advertising. International Journal of…