Latest Blog Post

I learned this the other day, taught by someone who works ‘in the industry’.

I haven’t googled it, so maybe you can do that and help me out with some information. 

What I understand from my short tutorial on fighter brands, is that it’s when a big company that sells a premium brand brings in a lower value, lower level brand to capture a greater market share.

Imagine Tesco Finest versus Tesco Value, I guess that probably does it quite well.

How does this apply though across healthcare then when you’re a company that sells a brand which is premium based on research and longevity and trust and you institute a fighter brand?

What story do you tell your customers? What story do I tell my patients?

Is it reasonable for me to say “I generally use this brand for my clinical procedure, but I can offer you the procedure cheaper using a cheaper brand but it might not be as good”?

Invariably the patient will say “Well what does ‘not as good’ mean?”

And then we’ll have to answer that…

So, does ‘not as good’ mean it doesn’t look as nice or does ‘not as good’ mean more liable to fall out or fail or cause you damage? Does ‘not as good’ mean it doesn’t come in a shiny box?

I have to say that I am completely and utterly confused about how this type of project would work within a healthcare scenario but I must also confess that I have inadvertently tried to institute a fighter brand into my practice previously.

Some years ago, we bought in a less expensive implant system to run alongside the implant system that we use.

What we found very quickly was that the incidences of failure on using the new implant system was much higher than that of the implant system we were already using and so in truth, what we were selling the patient was more risk of failure for less money.

Any way you shake or dress that up or show it around is unacceptable. The big issue here is where the responsibility lies, or where it should lie, what the companies will do is put the responsibility onto the clinician.

The companies will say “you get to choose – choose the premium brand with the research or the fighter brand without. Your choice – we just offer the product”

That’s all well and good and that would be our job as long as the company are providing the evidence, the numbers, the research, the facts to let us choose honestly.

Should the company not do that, should the company be shown to be withholding the information, modifying information or God help us, actually lying, then their reputation should be destroyed and their sales should collapse and we should move onto the next guy who actually understands that the end user for dental products is not a dentist but a patient.

Perhaps it would be easier to understand if we just slightly modified the name of a fighter brand to a sh**er brand.

Blog Post Number: 1845