Living it the resilient way: an autoethnographic account of marketing contribution to public value in healthcare

Healthcare is a complex service provided by an ecosystem where multiple stakeholders, from traditional (e.g., medical professionals) to new ones (e.g., patient advocacy groups), interact with patients. This article examines how marketing practices impact public value in healthcare through an autoethnographic account of a breast cancer experience lived by the author. By leveraging the author’s journey as both a patient and a marketing academic, the article illustrates how the marketing efforts of various stakeholders can foster or hinder public value. Four vignettes are presented, each coupled with reflexive analysis to offer insights into the different stages of the author’s journey, consisting of Diagnosis, Active Treatment, Consequential Treatments, and Survivorship. These vignettes explore how co-created touchpoints enhance resilience mechanisms throughout the patient journey. The findings contribute to the literature on patient journeys in high-stakes contexts and suggest implications for advancing public value through a patient-centric approach infused with ‘resilience by design’.