Medical Tourism Digital Promotion: A Contrastive Study From an Intercultural Communication Perspective

Abstract

The 2019 COVID-19 coronavirus disease, which has a significant influence on the medical tourism sector, necessitates the sector to focus on its online promotional messaging strategy. Given that the medical tourism sector is a global one, cultural diversity is also essential. However, promotional texts overlooked the cultural variabilities that can prevent potential global medical tourists from understanding the targeted marketing messaging. This study's objective was to look into the way in which selected Malaysian and Singaporean private hospital websites are presented to disseminate marketing messages to global patients travelling for medical treatment. For linguistic analysis, this study used Halliday's metafunction theory from the Systemic Functional Linguistic approach. The linguistic data were further analysed utilising the high and low context classification of cultures provided by Hall's cultural dimension of context dependency. High-context exhibits indirect communication and low-context demonstrates direct communication. The selected Malaysian and Singaporean webpages had features that were more common in low-context societies, such as complex code system, explicit message, highly structured message, focalisation of information and linear organisation. These findings were not consistent with the existing intercultural communication consulted in the literature which has associated Asian countries to high-context culture. The findings can assist stakeholders in medical tourism, website designers, and copywriters to understand the communicative strategies and possible cultural sensitivities in designing medical tourism websites for a country's successful international promotion.