Stryker Knee Replacement Strategy

consumer campaign since Stryker hired golfer Jack Nicklaus to endorse a ceramic hip replacement in 2003. This type of campaign would not be possible if Stryker did not utilize a decentralized marketing strategy. Capitalizing on opportunities such as the increase in knee replacement demand depends on marketing teams having the funds necessary to conduct market research on what people need as well as come up with effective advertising. Stryker provides those funds and is benefiting from doing so.
Stryker’s GetAroudKnee campaign was quite successful and actually resulted in patients requesting that their doctors install the knee replacement that Stryker now commonly offers. The campaign also led to a significant spike in Stryker’s website traffic …show more content…
However, not all sales reps are created equal. Stryker understands this. In 1993, the company implemented a unique hiring model that helped the company strengthen its sales efforts (Fastcompany, 1993). The model focused on hiring employees who scored high on a test designed to assess relationship building skills. Relationship building skills are critical because of the way Stryker markets its product lines. The lines are divided up into two main types of goods: capital and base goods (Fastcompany, 1993 and Burns, 2007). Due to the frequency of base good purchases, Stryker generates the highest profits from them, and according to a paper written by Burns, selling base goods is actually dependent on such relationship building skills (Burns, 2007). This means that the more fine-honed the sales team’s relationship building skills are the higher Stryker’s sales and profits stand to be. After implementing the hiring model, the results showed that employees who scored highest in relationship building skills produced 70% higher sales than those who scored the lowest on relationship building skills (Fastcompany, 1993). Stryker’s hiring model continues to play a key role in consistently hitting the 20% annual profit growth goal set by Brown in …show more content…
This reality has led major players in the industry to consolidate their buying efforts through group purchasing organizations (IBISworld). Group purchasing organizations by their nature make purchases in bulk to reduce price. However, according to a paper written by Grennan, the final price paid for products in markets where buyers and suppliers negotiate is dependent on more than factors like supplier costs, competition, and willingness to pay (Grennan, 2014). Grennan concludes that negotiating skill, which he refers to as bargaining ability, is actually more important, and that bargaining ability explains 79% of price variation. This suggest that Stryker was wise to implement its hiring model. By hiring sales people with excellent relationship building skills Stryker has been able to negotiate better pricing than most competitors for twenty-four years. Consistently securing favorable pricing for products bought and sold by the company also plays a key role in consistently hitting the 20% annual profit growth

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