Health and Sickness: A Buddhist View and Implications for Social Marketing

It is known that while health-care issues are highly important consumer concerns and closely tied to well‐being and quality of life, the perspective on the consumer often becomes clouded amid increasingly complex processes. This paper explores how Buddhist principles can permeate the marketing strategies of health-care organizations to deliver a positive, healing influence and thoughtful and sensitive services with an ethnographic study of a Nichiren Buddhist organization. It offers a vision for health-care marketing in crafting a message for severely ill patients to find meaning in life and live as fully as possible while accepting the presence of the illness.