Hospital Online Branding During the Pandemic: A healthy change in India

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way brands communicate to their potential and current customers. This paper uses a multimethod approach to specifically study nine corporate Indian chain hospital brands and their online social media presence during COVID-19. The authors sought to decipher the implicit information gained from Facebook pages and conducted a qualitative study with NVivo 12.3. to understand online branding activity over a year, which was for six months pre-COVID-19 and the first six months during COVID-19. This study corroborated these findings through qualitative interviews with six marketing managers from these brands and thus triangulated the findings. The objective of this paper is to understand these changes, and this will pave the way for the country's smaller hospitals that are yet to delve into Social Media Marketing.

Keywords

• COVID-19, branding, hospital marketing, crises management, social media, online marketing