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MARKETING MANAGEMENT INDIVIDUAL PROJECT: COLLECTIVE HEALTH #3
BUSI 520: Strategic Marketing Management
Professor:
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MARKETING MANAGEMENT INDIVIDUAL PROJECT: COLLECTIVE HEALTH
Q1. Explain the organization’s product plan.
Collective Health’s product plan is focused solely on their digital platform that is built to let
companies and their employees navigate the difficult task of understanding healthcare issues and
paying bills, while taking advantage of all the services they pay for. The product plan might be
one key offering, but it focuses on several key areas of business that companies are interested in.
Providing data-driven insights gives companies a better perspective on how to most efficiently
manage their healthcare costs. Using partnerships to continue to grow their network enhances
the value of the program as they expand coverage to more areas in the country. Using artificial
intelligence allows them to automate processes to enhance the end user’s experience (Collective
Health, 2024).
Q2. Explain the product’s/service’s current life cycle stage
Product life cycle breaks a companies offering into one of four life cycle stages.
Collective Health was founded in 2013, so they have eclipsed the introduction phase of the life
cycle and are now in the growth stage. In 2017, The Wall Street Journal listed Collective Health
as the #2 company in their top 25 tech companies to watch list, beating the other three health-
care companies that made the list. The interesting point that David Pettit made about the Top 25
list was that they gave more credit to companies that had founders that wanted to solve a
problem because no one was fixing it, which explains exactly how Collective Health was
founded (Pettit, 2017, para 12). They have successfully established themselves in the market and
are focused on continued growth, which is evident with their expansion into Plano, Texas. In
April, they just opened a new office that created 100 new jobs in Plano which is focused on their
bilingual customer and member experience team. With this expansion, Collective Health has
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grown to service more than 70 enterprise clients, over 500,000 members, and employed over 750
people in the last 8 years, with plans to add 50 more jobs by the end of 2024 (Taylor, 2024, para
1).
Q3. Discuss viable techniques of building the equity of the brand.
Collective Health has done a great job of building their brand equity by playing off their
strengths, which makes them unique and a better value proposition than their competitors. By
building image of perceived quality, they have linked their benefits to the growth strategy, which
has allowed them to expand across the country. Looking back to 2018, only 5 years after the
company was founded, their business model was embraced by tech companies such as Blizzard,
eBay, Pinterest, and Zendesk (Pflanzer, 2018, para 13). This was accomplished by strong
thought leadership, building the platform to give members an exceptional experience, and
strategically leveraging partnerships to continue building their brand association. In 2022,
Collective Health entered a strategic partnership with Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC),
which is the country's largest customer-owned health insurer with 17 million members across
Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. HCSC recognized that Collective Health
was instrumental in the digital healthcare transformation we see today, and they recognized by
building their relationship, HCSC can offer their customers a best-in-class solution for
navigating the healthcare landscape (Health Care Service Corporation, 2021). Collective Health
has built their perceived quality to companies by emphasizing the importance of performance
metrics, which allow companies to make data-driven decisions based on their employees product
use, as well as how much money the save by utilizing Collective Health’s platform (Collective
Health, 2024b).
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Q4. Discuss several branding decisions recently made or appropriate to make.
Since Collective Health’s product is intangible and is built from the concept of
combining multiple services into one location, their branding decisions are based on continually
building perceived value for all end users. Their website header brings the questions of what
they do, who they serve, and about us to the top of the screen, where most companies place it at
the bottom of a web page in small font. A study published by the National Library of Medicine
looked at community participation in health services, and noted in the conclusion that higher
healthcare community participation levels provided a positive public health impact and is
effective for optimal healthcare interventions (Haldane et al., 2019, para 3). The concept of
Collective Health stemmed from a lack of transparency in the healthcare system, so they are
branding themselves as value leaders by driving member engagement, which ultimately leads to
cost savings for healthcare providers and end users, as outlined throughout their impact study on
their website. By expanding their partnerships with national networks, they are keeping an focus
of building their brand of tailored health benefits, which is a key factor for companies to recruit
top talent. Just last month, Collective Health announced another expansion to 14 more states,
including key target markets of Ohion, New York, Virginia, and Georgia (Collective Health,
2024b).
Q5. Discuss organizational efforts at customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.
Our reading says that differentiation means communicating and delivering value require
different approaches depending on the customer group that is being addressed (Marshall &
Johnston, 2023, P.269). Collective is following that footprint by expanding their physical
footprint recently with the opening of their Plano, TX facility. The Plano office was specifically
built to hose the bilingual customer and member experience team, which allows Collective
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Health to expand support to their members who primarily speak Spanish. This is a service that is
a differentiator by showing their commitment to customers in a large new target market. This is
a value based marketing decision that allows Collective to better service their clients in Texas
such as Academy Sports and Daiken with specialized customer care agents (Taylor, 2024, para
2). They continue to promote customer loyalty and retention by achieving high promotor scores,
lower administrative costs for companies, and member inquiry call response time of 30 seconds
of less for 80% of the volume. They provide a partner collective network of over 100 healthcare
organizations, which gives a competitive advantage of being able to link almost any type of
healthcare service into their system (Collective Health, 2024b).
.
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References
Collective Health. (2024a). Impact Study. Collective Health. https://collectivehealth.com/impact-
study/
Collective Health. (2024b). The Partner CollectiveTM - Collective Health. Collectivehealth.com.
https://collectivehealth.com/partner-collective/
Haldane, V., Chuah, F. L. H., Srivastava, A., Singh, S. R., Koh, G. C. H., Seng, C. K., & Legido-
Quigley, H. (2019). Community participation in health services development,
implementation, and evaluation: A systematic review of empowerment, health,
community, and process outcomes. PLoS One, 14(5).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6510456/
Health Care Service Corporation. (2021, March 23). Health Care Service Corporation and
Collective Health Announce Plans to Deliver Streamlined, Digital Health Care
Experience at Scale. Www.hcsc.com.
https://www.hcsc.com/newsroom/news-releases/2021/collective-health-announce-plans-
strategic-relationship
Marshall, G. W., & Johnston, M. W. (2023). Marketing management (4th ed.). New York, Ny
Mcgraw-Hill Education.
Pettit, D. (2017, June 15). Top 25 Tech Companies to Watch. Wall Street Journal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-25-tech-companies-to-watch-1497492480
Pflanzer, L. R. (2018, February 19). A hot startup could be the perfect model for the JPMorgan-
Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway healthcare initiative. Business Insider.
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https://www.businessinsider.com/collective-healths-approach-to-self-insured-employer-
health-plans-2018-2
Taylor, K. (2024, April 29). Current News | Plano Economic Development, TX - Official
Website. Planotexas.org; Plano Economic Development.
https://planotexas.org/259/Current-News?contentId=afd97f46-a5a7-4785-939e-
be2fd561511c&seeMoreWidgetId=30209454-a2a0-4542-852b-3f5fd0ecfc3c
WTW. (2023, July 7). Infographic: U.S. employers look to enhance benefits to attract and retain
talent. WTW. https://www.wtwco.com/en-us/insights/2023/07/infographic-us-employers-
look-to-enhance-benefits-to-attract-and-retain-talent
