It feels like years since I wrote about commoditisation, but it was something that fascinated me at the very start of setting up The Campbell Clinic and trying to define the vision and the direction that we would head into and the space that we would occupy in the dental market.
I was touched massively by a comment that Chris Barrow made on the opening day of The Campbell Clinic and Campbell Academy in October 2013.
Crazily, it was just days before I would receive the letter from the GDC about 'that GDC case', but I remember Chris saying that there were 100 places in Nottingham that you could get a dental implant, but there was only one place you could get a Campbell Clinic implant.
That stuck with us long and hard, so we decided to go all in on differentiation based on decommoditisation.
I do not subscribe to this business of 'a screw is a screw', I subscribe to bespoke individual care for people both as customers and as patients.
Interestingly, when I went for the consultation about my knee replacement in January, the surgeon said that it didn't really matter which type of joint he used on me as a prosthesis because that whole world was commoditised now. I instantly understood that the value that I was paying for was him providing the procedure.
I recently got sent a message by a friend showing somebody giving crazy, crazy discounts for aligner therapies on National Smile Month (or equivalent).
If there's one thing we understand at The Campbell Clinic, it's the finances, we know the metrics, we know what makes money and what doesn't, we know what our costs are, and we're very, very good at controlling it.
The discounts that were being offered were either:
1) Insane and ridiculous, loss-making discounts or 2). A lie. Maybe the discounts were designed by these people to try and get people through the door to upsell them for more, or maybe they just don't know the numbers.
The likelihood is that they're getting a colossal discount from Invisalign for doing a set amount of numbers and they're falling down on that and all of a sudden their commoditised model now is going to move from a situation where they were making a little bit of money to where they're losing money hand over fist.
Discounts disappear, numbers disappear, it's a spiral to the bottom.
How did you go bankrupt? "Gradually, gradually, and then suddenly".
The risk for commoditisation is that the bigger business will always be able to sell more than you, and therefore they will always be able to buy it cheaper than you, and therefore the only chance you have is to decommoditise.
Decommoditisation is about service, it's about personal service above and beyond that which is expected by the individual, it's summarised "This is expensive, but you'll get more than you pay for".
You have to be brave and build a brand, and then a system where you understand your numbers, but it works.
It's actually the only way that the independent sphere will be able to survive against this commoditisation of the pension funds and private equity funds that strive to take over the low end of dentistry.
Blog Post Number - 4171