Emerging Marketing Research on Healthcare and Medical Decision Making: Toward a Consumer-Centric and Pluralistic Methodological Perspective

Abstract

T he healthcare market has been changing rapidly since the new millennium, creating a need for a new, integrated perspective on consumer relevant healthcare topics through the lens of psychology, marketing, and economics (Wood 2018; Iacobucci 2019). Even though marketing and consumer researchers with both quantitative and qualitative orientations have recently joined forces to tackle these emerging topics, healthcare and medical decision making remain understudied substantive areas. The goal of the current special issue was to stimulate high-quality scholarly articles focusing on contemporary issues in healthcare and medical decision making from both consumer research and marketing science perspectives in order to advance our understanding of consumer, firm, and regulatory choices and their interactive impact on healthcare markets and relevant public policy. In this editorial, we first review the evolution of healthcare ecosystems, followed by a summary of extantmarketing literature addressing healthcare issues. We then propose a consumer-centric and pluralistic methodological approach that we hope will advance the corpus on research in marketing that examines healthcare and medical decision making. Next, we summarize the nine articles included in this special issue and highlight the novel insights that they contribute. We concludewith a discussion of future directions and priorities in healthcare marketing and decision-making research.