Cottonwood Children's Hospital: Safety Message Campaign

© 1994
ISBN 0-324-00311-0

Case Teaching Package
A case teaching package is available for this case. It includes strategies for case presentation, key concepts, solutions to the assignment questions in the case, and suggestions for the most effective ways to work this case into your course.

Length
This case is 14 pages in length and its case teaching package is 6 pages.

Abstract

This case centers around the safety message campaign of Cottonwood Children's Hospital. Joanna Williams, Director of Community Relations at Cottonwood Children's Hospital, commissioned a group of MBA students to perform a marketing research study to determine top-of-mind awareness of the campaign among parents in a two county area. The objectives of the campaign and the study were to prevent childhood injuries and to increase goodwill toward the hospital. Williams wanted support for continued funding of the campaign and thus wanted evidence that the messages were reaching their desired target. Several unusual issues arose during the course of the study, and the researchers were only able to obtain 53 completed surveys, although the information gleaned from these respondents appeared very informative.

At the time of the case, the safety message campaign was in its third year. Messages were run on television during a six-week period in the spring and again during the December holiday season. Radio messages were run concurrently with the television advertisements. Williams instructed the research team to design and implement a phone survey of parents/guardians in Gunn and Comanche counties with children aged 13 years old or less. The researchers determined the composition of the questionnaire, and made all decisions concerning sampling issues. Their target was 188 completed surveys within a 2-3 week time frame.

The students encountered two major problems during the course of their study: a low hit rate and a change in message timing. The students' initial hit rate was 1/40 = 2.5%. This raised questions about the phone introduction used, the tedium of data collection, the timing of the phone calls (daytime versus evening), and the screening through which respondents had to pass to participate.

The second major problem encountered was a change in the air date of the safety messages. The messages were not scheduled to air until the study was complete, but began airing in the middle of November while the survey was in progress. An unexpected sum of money had been received by the hospital, and it was decided that the best use of the funds was to extend the safety campaign. Approximately 15-20 surveys had been completed when the safety messages began airing. As one way to assess the validity of the findings, an analysis could have been done to compare awareness of those 15-20 surveys completed prior to the airing of the commercials versus those completed afterward.

Linkages to Textbooks or Journal Articles/Fit Within a Course

The Cottonwood Children's Hospital case is illustrative of the messiness of conducting marketing research. Textbooks still do not discuss this level of imperfection in the marketing research process. The situation was the "best case" scenario in that students of a prestigious university were working with a non-profit hospital in an effort to obtain information. No selling was involved, and thus the study should have been able to proceed with relatively few complications. However, the case reflects what can happen in a decade when consumers are being increasingly bombarded by telemarketing calls in their homes.

This case should be taught in one of three marketing courses: the marketing research module of an introductory marketing course; the marketing research module of a non-profit marketing course; or as part of a course on marketing research. The case is rich enough to take up 75-90 minutes of class time. The last paragraph of the case outlines most of the critical questions going through Williams' mind. Overall, the case touches on a number of important concepts, including research design, sampling, interpretation of results and the imperfections of the marketing research process. Students enjoy this case because they can easily relate to the topic, because the original study was conducted by fellow students, and because there is ample scope for discussion on each of the key topics. Although the instructor is free to adopt any direction that he/she or the class desires, we hope that by the end of the discussion the following points would have been covered.