Research for online marketing strategy in Japanese elder care facilities : Learn form Swedish elder care facilities

Sammanfattning: Background: Since aging population keeps increasing, more and more private elderly care facility companies emerged in elderly care market, and this industry gradually became one of the pillar industries in Japan. However, a strange phenomenon is that private elderly care facilities in Japan fails to attract elderly customers while there are society demand to expand the number of facility. This leads to bankruptcies of private elderly care facilities. On the other hand, Sweden enjoys a high reputation of elderly care. Also Swedish elderly care industry is more mature than Japan, therefore this research takes Sweden as an objective of Japan. Purpose: Identifying the root cause of why elders do not choose private facilities even though there are social demand to expand elderly care facilities; from online-marketing perspective, take Swedish companies as examples, find out the way to apply online marketing strategy to Japanese elderly care facilities. Method: This is a qualitative research, with inductive approach, from interpretivist epistemology and constructionism ontology perspective. Structured phone interviews are conducted with 11 Japanese elders and their general view towards private and public elderly care facilities in Japan are studied; then, researchers choose 2 companies in Sweden and Japan respectively as cases and analyze online marketing strategy; following the "strategy exploring model" logic, analyze the development of online marketing strategy for Japanese private elderly care facilities. Results, conclusions: Elders in Japan choose public elderly care facilities instead of private, because of the high cost and lack of reliability. Therefore, marketing strategy ii goal is to lower the deposit and establish an image of security and safety of industry. According to the result of online marketing research, authors will give advice for Japanese elder care industry to achieve this goal.