Canadian Blood Services

Canadian Blood Services

Canadian Blood Services is an Institution created and regulated by the Health Ministry to assure the blood supply through Canada in a safe and sufficient way. CBS was founded when a scandal on contaminated blood in the 80’s affected thousands patients, even causing the death on some of them. To face the problem, the Canadian government created CBS as an independent institution that will manage all voluntarily blood donations and its distributions.

The blood supply is achieved by unpaid, voluntarily donations from people who find this activity rewarding by doing good without receiving anything in return, however there are some restrictions in order to donate blood that reduces the units of blood collected such as age, weight and health conditions. Considering these limitations the recollection may face an unavoidable restriction on the supply, although 50% of Canada population is eligible for donations. This concern was appointed by CBS Marketing Manager when he detected that the demand was growing 2 per cent per year whereas the supply wasn’t increasing at the same rate. He identified several reasons such as new operating procedures, peak demand seasons, decrease of wait times in hospitals, however this only confirms the fact that CBS needs to face the problem of the demand can soon enough overcome the supply.

So the problem is obvious: how to increase the demand? At first I can think of answering that question with 2 options: attract new people interested to engage into the blood donation culture or increase the number of donations of people who is already involved with the CBS.

The marketing manager needs to understand what drives people to make donations, especially when there is no reward for doing it. So why do people donate blood? I came up with three specific reasons:

1. - People do it because they want to feel good about it, and because it’s a good deed.

2. - People who have found themselves in a situation that required the CBS for either their own use or for someone they know, they donate to express gratitude and to return de favor.

3. - People who have had enough involvement with CBS or the blood donation community and it is really aware of the importance of having enough supply when real life emergencies appears. They are truly convinced of the benefits because they have seen it.

Then, the manager needs to identify of these 3 groups, when they are more willing to donate, for each group there is a different time in the decision making process:

1. - People interested in feeling good, may do research on a way to do it, in this case they are looking around on what to do to make a good deed, this can involve so many things, then it will select the activity that will make it feel comfortable but good at same time.

2. - People with a medical emergency will make the decision as soon as the emergency

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