Participation is a key element of my company's marketing strategy. Our marketing department spends a lot of time interacting with our customers, trying to bring that personal connection that will make them feel that their opinions and their feedback is valued by us as a company. We often bring surgeons in for a "VIP experience," where they get a tour of our facility and an overview of our product portfolio. If our surgeons have a bad experience with one of our products, often one of our marketing representatives will reach out to them directly to try to understand what went wrong. If necessary we will travel to our customer's locations and meet with them face to face to try to resolve any issues. Overall, I would say we have a very customer focused marketing strategy.

Participation as mentioned by srg36, it is important for a company's marketing strategy in the sense that it creates a welcoming feeling for new customers and shows that the medical device company is always open minded to hear to suggestions and concerns to further improve their products. Like many other products there will always be issues, or concerns, its always better to hear from the customer and address it at that moment instead of having the FDA discover of the issue and create a larger problem. In the current company, we allow new technicians from many practices to come to our hands on course held at our HQ to train and certify their technicians on the usage of our device, this program is good for new customers and old customers that have hired new technicians. This type of service helps the doctors and their technicians become more confident and understanding of the science behind it and utilization to help provide a greater quality of care to patients.

Participation is the best practice for incorporating it into market strategy.Many companies are using social media marketing and business blogging in their market.Customers are more happy to give review on social media.online forums are also created by companies where customer are participating.Marriot international also create Facebook game My Marriot Hotel that invites player to manage their own virtual hotels.participation does not have to be complex.

I did some research on marketing strategy, adding to the discussion, there are seven Ps for marketing: product, price, promotion, place, participation, positioning and people.
People:
To be successful in business, you must develop the habit of thinking in terms of exactly who is going to carry out each task and responsibility. In many cases, it's not possible to move forward until you can attract and put the right person into the right position.

A good example ,in his best-selling book, "Good to Great", for Jim Collins, he discovered the most important factor applied by the best companies was that they first of all "got the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus." Once these companies had hired the right people, the second step was to "get the right people in the right seats on the bus." So, to be successful in business, you must develop the habit of thinking in terms of exactly who is going to carry out each task and responsibility. In many cases, it's not possible to move forward until you can attract and put the right person into the right position.
So, having the right people is essential because they are as much a part of your business offering as the products/services you are offering.

The fifth P of marketing, participation plays a very important role in making an effective marketing strategy. With participation, the company promotes a stronger interaction between the employees and customers. As mentioned in the lecture, participation gives the customer control. With the idea of participation, the feedback received by the customers will allow for the company to determine the best way to market and improve their product. As the marketing team directly works with the customers, they will be able to understand exactly what the customers need. Even when just promoting the product before releasing it, the company sees how the product is received based on response to advertisement. If there are negative criticisms towards the product, the marketing team will work to make the product the best fit for the customers accordingly. All five P’s involved in the marketing strategy: product, price, promotion, placement, and participation, go hand in hand in suiting the needs of the customer and creating the most effective product.

One of the major marketing strategies used within the company I work at is the fifth P. Our products are mostly used by surgeons and physicians; therefore, the marketing group will hold meetings with hospitals to discuss the product. The customer, in our case doctors and surgeons, would provide feedback on ways to improve the device. This creates an environment of participation between the customer and company. The main focus other than safety and success is to meet the customers requirements. Since the company I work at sells products internationally, the fifth P is key to our success. In terms of marketing and business, networking is key to promoting and selling products. By getting feedback from customers we can improve our devices. Currently, our company has been researching different ways to implement our medical device(IABs) into a patient because of the different feedbacks received by surgeons.

Participation, the fifth P of marketing, is crucial when marketing a product. You need to engage your potential client(s). At Sloan we actively market are medical devices and we will meet with companies and have the surgeon explain the unmet need that the medical device solves present a pitch deck and, show the company how the medical device works. I think that having the element of Participation allows the company to get a better understanding of the product and allows for @bb254 mentions an opportunity to network and to obtain feedback which can be helpful. If you receive the same feedback from multiple companies you can make sure you address any concerns that are mentioned so that you are able improve/enhance the product. Our end goal at Sloan is usually to just out-license the device directly to a larger /mid-level device company. So the 5th P is very important be we are looking for a potential licensee that will move the technology forward so we must engage the company and allow them to really participate with the inventors/surgeons so that they are able to assess the value of the product we are pitching and it increases the likelihood that we will license MSK's proprietary medical device technologies if we actively market and engage with the potential licensees .It also affords us the opportunity to make new connections and even if they end up passing on a technology, we've made a connection, so they can comeback to us in the future if they are looking for a particular type of technology for their portfolio.

I am not very familiar with my companies marketing strategies. However, I do think we use a participation approach. At one of our all employee meetings last year a representative from the ER department of one of the largest hospitals in Ottawa came to speak. They hosted a 6 month trial with the use of our device and described their success, their challenges, their implementation strategies, and also provided feedback of some limitations and voiced some future technology requests on behalf of his staff. I think it was very informative to directly hear from our end user who didn’t use the device once, it was a full integration of the devices and the peripherals into their existing Emergency Room operations and flow.

At the medical device company I work at, our marketing team focuses on actively following the customers who continue to buy our products. They stay on top of any issues the customer has in terms of malfunctioning devices, questions, or feedback. Working hand in hand with the surgeons who continue to use our products is key because these are the people who provide crucial feedback in terms of what can we do to make our product better.

I agree with @alexandrabuga and @bb254 about the importance of Participation. I want to further emphasize the importance of participation, especially now in this era, participation is required to keep up with the market and maintain brand relevancy. Thanks to social media and social networks, brands and companies can get feedback on where they stand, the good/bad points on their products or the quality of their customer service through direct customers. A Havard Business Review article titled: "The One Number You Need to Grow" presented a direct correlation between Net Promoter Score and the ability of a company to surpass their peers in regards to growth: "the percentage of customers who were enthusiastic enough to refer a friend or colleague [...]correlated directly with differences in growth rates among competitors. So the fifth P is a crucial part of a brand's marketing strategy.