FRIENDS' H to To build their business Betty and Joan developed a plan to purchase data provided by a national survey company help identify potential customers. The data would give them the names and addresses of individuals who had recently been hospitalized and were over the age of 65. Friends' Home Health hired a small, local marketing com- pany to develop promotional material for the business. They decided to mail to each person on the list informa- tion about the firm. After a month of mailings they had only two inquiries and no new customers from all their efforts. The founders met with the marketing company again to discuss what could be done. Early on in the develop- ment of the business they had decided to create only a one- screen Web page figuring that their customer base would not be users of the Internet to make any decisions. Upon reflection, however, the partners began to realize that their target customer was not likely the person hospitalized but often those who loved and cared for the person who was hospitalized. Often these individuals were children of the elderly person, who may not even live in the area. Thus, Betty and Joan wondered if the more technologically savvy children of the target market would be using the Internet to evaluate providers. However, developing a complex and creative website was projected to cost $10,000, which they thought was a lot of money for marketing. So the founders thought through the process of hos- pitalization and recognized that there was an intermedi- ate step in the care of an elderly person. After a hospital HOME HEALTH Friends HOME HEALTH a a stay, an elderly person typically would go to a rehabilita- tion hospital where care would be provided for a period of days, weeks, or months depending on when the unit believed the patient could be released to less intensive care. Another issue is the amount of time that insurance will pay for a rehabilitation stay. Many policies limit this care to a set number of days after which the patient and/or patient's family must assume financial responsi- bility. The unintended consequence of this is that many patients are released who are not capable of self-care. The care in a rehabilitation hospital is typically not as intense nor is performed by as highly trained a staff as in a hospital, but it occurs when a patient is not thought to be able to be home alone. Thus, the founders of Friends Home Health began to consider the potential need to seek out key referral agents such as rehabilitation hospitals or the doctors themselves who may refer the patient to them. QUESTIONS 1. Do you think that Friends' Home Health Care's origi- nal target market should still be its target market? 2. What forms of marketing and advertising should Friends' create to generate greater customer knowl- edge about the service with its target audience? 3. Out of all of the marketing outlets available, which will be the most productive for Friends'? Why? 4. How would you evaluate the website expenditure? Is it a good value for Friends