You Are NOT the Patient: Stop Marketing to Yourself

No matter how well you know your market, you are not your client.

There’s nothing more useless to the business of plastic surgery than the practice of narcissism. Self-adoration only leads to misinterpretation. You don’t think like her, you don’t behave like her, and you don’t share her preferences. So stop making decisions as if you were her.

Indulge me in a couple of stories first.

The surgeon who liked his ugly logo

I was sitting with a prospective client, a plastic surgeon in the middle of opening a new surgical suite and setting up his business identity. He showed me a logo design and a website layout. The logo was ugly, but honestly, that matters less than you’d think. Branding is done backwards anyway. The bigger problem was that it would reproduce poorly and be hard to work with on business cards and his website. And the site itself was nothing special: unremarkable color, completely centered on him, with a layout that did nothing to pull the reader through to a logical conclusion.

I pointed all of this out and told him to hire someone to do it properly. His answer: “Well, I like them.”

What a stupid answer that was.

The practice run on a twenty-year-old’s whims

Another client was convinced his office staff knew which products to buy and which services to add to the practice, because they were young women and users of the services themselves. Laser treatments, eyelash products, skin creams. On the face of it, that seems logical, right? Not exactly. First let me tell you what happened in that practice.

In spite of my repeated objections, the practice ran this way for years. I finally ended the client relationship out of frustration. He, of course, kept his office manager and receptionists. Things went well enough while the economy was good and sales came easily. That didn’t last.

A couple of years after we parted ways, in the middle of a recession, I was invited to an industry event for the launch of a new skin line. His office manager and staff happened to be attending too. The big-name dermatologist presenting the line did an excellent job of selling the room on its merits. About two weeks later, my former client had stripped every previous product from his website and exclusively carried the new line.

He isn’t the only one in the city selling it. There was no business advantage. What happened was that his office manager is in her twenties and not too bright. She’s impressionable, the event wowed her, and she convinced the owner, who trusts her because of her loyalty, to scrap the old lines and bring in the new. You should never bet your product strategy on the whim of a twenty-year-old airhead.

That practice is still in business, but it’s a fraction of what it used to be. While I was there, we dominated the market. Now they’ve fallen far behind.

Where this thinking goes wrong

Your staff’s taste is not market data

Your staff has preferences and biases. They may like a product because that company’s rep is extra nice and the other one is rude. They might use a laser service because you give them a steep staff discount. Even if it works for them, it may not be what the public buys. After all, the public doesn’t get staff discounts. A funny thing happens when something goes from free to $400 a session: no matter how much someone loves a FREE thing, she won’t necessarily pay for it out of her own pocket. It’s the same buyer psychology I cover in how to price cosmetic procedures.

Your staff is also IN the business. They know things and see things that make them decide differently than your prospective patients ever would. They’re too close to be objective. A receptionist using a $200 eyelash lengthener she gets free every month from the maker tells you nothing about whether patients will fork out $200 for longer lashes every couple of months.

Relying on staff to set strategy is irresponsible. YOU have to be in charge of strategy, and you can’t run it by the seat of your pants. You need what actually works, not what anyone thinks will work. And please, don’t trust their over-exaggerated reports either. If a sentence from your staff starts with “a lot of,” it was one incident. Maybe two. I’ve watched one complaint get stretched into “a lot of patients are saying” far too many times in cosmetic practices. If there’s one thing staff love, it’s unnecessary drama.

Being the doctor doesn’t make you the expert on everything

You have a specific set of skills, and you should stick to them. Making it through medical school doesn’t mean you can pick up a welding torch and turn your car into a convertible. What you focus on is what you’re good at, and you’re good at medical aesthetics. Unless you design logos regularly, don’t design your logo. If you’re not a developer, don’t build your site. If you’re not a marketer, stop guessing at marketing and get help. It’s a spectacular misuse of your time, and you could be WAY off the mark without knowing it.

Your opinion is not the market’s opinion. You know far too much about what you do to be objective. You’ve attended dozens of lectures and traded techniques with countless colleagues. You perform surgery or injections for profit, for perfection, for status. Your patient is not there for your reasons. She’s buying your services for HER reasons, and you cannot guess at them from your side of the table. It’s not that you’re incompetent. You’re just not a buyer of your own services. You’re on the inside looking out.

The only two valid ways to decide

1. Listen to the market

Listening to the market is the golden rule of business. Marketers can tell you until they’re blue in the face that they know what’s going to work, and they’d be lying. As a marketer, I know where the starting line is. I know where to stand to give you an advantage in the race and make sure you’re not running in the opposite direction. Even I can’t predict exactly what happens once you start running. That’s why we test.

Everything from your ads to your positioning needs testing. Once your strategy is in place, it’s the only way to know things are working and getting better. It’s the only way to continuously improve.

Stroking your ego, or that of your staff, is not how you grow a practice. Put your opinion aside and watch what the consumer does instead.

2. Plug into a system already tested in practices like yours

There’s one exception to rule #1: insider information that’s already been tested in other markets, in the same kind of business as your own. In my book, I lay out the formula we built through years of testing and watching what consumers respond to across multiple practices.

That kind of system gives you a head start over competitors, but it’s not a substitute for testing. Even with ours, we keep testing, then move what we learn across our other clients’ businesses. And because we take one client per area exclusively, your competitor never gets access to the same system while you work with us. That exclusivity is baked into how our plastic surgery marketing agency engagements work. If you’re tired of deciding by gut feel, get in touch and we’ll show you what the market in your city is actually responding to.

You’re not the patient. If you’re not testing and doing what actually works, you’re feeding your ego, not your bank account.

“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” ―Peter F. Drucker