Dental Marketing

Excuse me if I come off as cynical. I will try my hardest to fight the tendency during this installment. However, any discussion regarding marketing in general – and in this case, dentistry – immediately sets off my lie detector. Just as we have labeled various eras of man’s existence with terms such as the “stone age”, great awakening”, and “industrial revolution”, our present time may one day be labeled the “information age”. If insight is plentiful, it may just as well be labeled the “disinformation age”.

So here’s just a few examples of dental marketing that I have seen that you may want to think about.

Yesterday, a patient told me that their eighty-year-old father had a filling done by his dentist using a device that required no local anesthetic. I told them that I did four fillings recently on a 2-and-a-half year old girl without anesthetic while she giggled through the entire procedure. The entire time I used a standard dental drill.

Fillings done with a drill without anesthetic are common. The key here is not the device but who the patient is and how deep the drilling is going to be. I have done many crown preparations (not shallow) on people with no anesthetic at their request. They just don’t care. Any device used to remove tooth structure on a normal, conscious patient will hurt if it goes deep enough.

I cannot tell you how many devices I have seen in 30 years that claim to be painless. They end up in an ad in a magazine, and someone reads it and comes in. When I tell them that I don’t use it, they think that I am not up to date.

Caring hands are more important than what’s in them.

Several years ago, the Benefits Coordinator at my wife’s previous employer sent a flyer out to all of the employees discussing the dental benefits options. They explained that with a particular insurance plan, an employee could go to any dentist of their choosing, BUT if they picked a dentist off of the list, they could get treatment at wholesale prices.

In a social setting I walked up to them and explained that there is no such thing as wholesale in dentistry. Not only does the concept not exist, the idea of a bargain was misguided. An ethical dental practice is expensive to operate. Good, licensed people are expensive, as is equipment, materials, cleanliness, lab work, and much more. There are often many ways to treat a dental problem with a range of cost. The important thing is to determine what you can afford. After that, price is irrelevant. It is all about value, i.e. what I am getting for what I am paying.

There is no such thing as wholesale in Dentistry.

Branding patient procedures in dentistry would be laughable if it wasn’t so absurd. In the industry, getting through the maze of branded materials requires constant attention to how one brand differs from another, and what brands are the same thing with a different name. And we are supposed to be the pros! Pitty the consumer who falls victim to a specific type of procedure that has a brand name added to it.

Most dentists want to do a good job. If a particular brand was that great, I would think most of us would be using it.

Bottom line: in Dentistry, the important products are integrity, experience, and good hands.

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