Who is my Customer? A Story of Achievment in Germany.

Again Germany could be a sample how to deal with the complexities of the rehab market sucessfully. If you take the right decision on the trivial question: Who is my customer?

To identify your customer is one of the basics in marketing. You do a segmentation or you “enlarge your pond”, it is a daily execise.

In the rehab industry of Western Europe the definititon of the customer is always a little bit complicated. You have the patient who uses your product, a therapist, who advises the patient and in most of the countries a dealer who buys from you. In the end the bill is mostly paid by a public healthfund. In the Nordic countries the scenario is a little bit clearer as a public health supplier decides about the products and you do not have dealers. In England you find parallel markets public and private. In Germany, however, we find the whole range of complexity: patient, of course, therapists, dealers and public insurances as payors of the party. Therefore you will find a lot of different but not always consistent answers who the customer is.

As far as I can see there are not many companies with a clear customer definition on the German market. Some have decided but they do not act consistently.

Example: Kuschall has a clear patient oriented marketing but the high-price super-designed chairs shall be paid by the public (bankrupt) health insurance.

Let’s look to an example of a consistent decision about the customer: Lifestand, the French manufacturer of verticalization wheelchairs! They decided that without any compromise the patient is their customer. They get him directly in the clinic, they support him with samples at home and they offer a lawyer service which helps to get the approval from the public insurance if necessary by a lawsuit. This system is so perfect that sometimes the customer did not even know that the company has sent its lawyer to put pressure on the health insurance. Dealers get only a finder’s and application fee because Lifestand is not allowed to apply directly to the insurances. - This little disadvantage will disappear next year. - This consequently worked out strategy helped Lifestand to focus the salesforce in competence and approach very effectively.

Lifestand enjoys strong double digit growth, took over 50% of the market share (manually propelled chairs) of the former quasi monopolist Levo and kept the prices up.

Do you remember my first update? This story does not work in a one stop shopping environment. So how can companies with more than one product line do it? Best (not perfect) example is Sunrise (Sopur). But this is another story.