Assignment: MKT2007 Marketing Planning for Services
Your task is to prepare a report for the Senior Director of a NHS Trust which evaluates and justifies the need for services marketing. You will need to explore the different information resources available to you. This will enable you to provide a suitable response to the 3 areas relating services marketing planning and internal marketing of the healthcare provider. A guide to the information resources that will be of use to you follows:
Books and e-books
A good starting point for any research is the library catalogue.Use the keyword box to locate appropriate books for your topic. I would suggest that you date order your results list so that the most recent items appear at the top - to do this, just change the word ‘title’ in the drop down menu to ‘date’ and then click on the Z-A icon. You may come across some weblinks which relate to items which are electronically available. There are a couple of e-books that may be of use to you relating to services marketing. To access these items just follow the link to the database and login with your Athens details.
Websites
It is rarely advisable to use too many websites in your assignments, but you may find one or two sources of interest. For example, the Chartered Institute of Marketing have worked with the NHS to produce a White Paper on adopting a marketing approach entitled ‘The Real NHS’. Always make sure you evaluate any websites before you include them in your research.
MetaLib
Other information resources are linked on the MetaLib pages. To access MetaLib, click on Subject Resources from the library home page. Enter MetaLib with your campus login. This is usually your student number (username) and date of birth (password) unless you have changed your password. From the MetaSearch page, choose Marketing from the subject menu on the left. You will then notice a list of subcategories, which is where the different sources of information are linked. You do not need all of the resources for this assignment, but may wish to look at some of the ones identified below.
Journals
This category is at the top of the list because, apart from books, you will mostly want to refer to journal articles. The key databases for marketing/business are ABI, Emerald and ScienceDirect and it may be worth searching those databases individually to see if they have anything related to your topic.
You can also search up to 10 databases in one go by using the MetaSearch function. For this topic, which could potentially cross over into other subject areas, it would worth looking at some of the other databases on the list. You will notice that the databases are all ticked from the MetaSearch page. Try entering some appropriate keywords in the box at the top e.g. hospitals and marketing. Click GO and wait for the results list to appear. Each item in the list will have 2 icons by the side of it. If you click on the shopping basket, the item details will be saved in your folder called ‘My Space’ (items will be stored in this area until you delete them). The University Shield icon can be used to check full text availability of the journal across all of the databases and will direct you accordingly.
News
Worth a mention, but you won’t find an enormous amount of useful material in the newspapers. Under the news heading you will find a database called LexisNexis. You will need to login with Athens to this database and then click on the news heading along the top red toolbar. Enter your keywords in the boxes provided, but be careful because newspapers will carry an abundance of information in them and not all of it will be useful. Try narrowing your search to the headlines and using different keywords to see what works.
Guides and Tutorials
You have to reference your work using the Harvard system. A comprehensive guide to Harvard Referencing is available under this heading on MetaLib.