Bizarre as it may seem, one of my duties as a Senior House Officer in Maxillofacial surgery at Queens Medical Centre between 1995 and 1996 was to look after the leeches.
In patients who had had major cancer surgery and free flaps (parts of their body transferred to the site that had been where their tumor had been chopped out) and the flaps were deemed to be failing because the plumbing wasn’t working we would ‘order’ a pot of six leeches from the City Hospital in Nottingham and stitch them onto the graft. The leeches would get to work sucking any blood they could find out of the graft (it wasn’t draining normally) and when they got so fat that they couldn’t suck blood anymore we popped them back in the pots, sent them back to City and they were made to vomit in ways I don’t understand before being sent back to us for reuse. The ultimate recycling!
It never seemed to work though. The fundamental problem wasn’t the blood in the flap, it was the fact that it wouldn’t drain and that wasn’t fixed by leeches.
Of course leeches were used for hundreds of years before I used them and in those days they were the cure for everything or for nothing. The rationale at that stage was ‘you need bloodletting, if it works it’s the cure, if it doesn’t work you would never have been fixed anyway’ and so to our experiences of modern marketing in dentistry because my fear is that we’re beginning to get a little bit fed up of marketing in our practice and organisation.
The reason for this is that many of the people we come up against seem to be like the ancient physicians using bloodletting and leeches. If your turnover increases while your marketing with us it was because of us, if it doesn’t increase then you were doing something wrong or you haven’t done it properly or your front desk team are letting you down or you’re not having the right conversations or you’re not good enough in surgery. It seems like a win-win to the marketers in my view.
What I would like in modern marketing is a guarantee of effectiveness but when I suggest this to people the seem taken aback as though i’m asking to take their wife on holiday for a few days without them but in fact this is what we give our own patients in the practice. The majority of our implant patients are given a ten-year guarantee as long as they attend for maintenance (i.e. do what they’re asked to do) so what I would like a marketing company to do with me is to tell me what I need to do and then sell me the product and guarantee that it works or they’ll give me my money back or, better still, not take any money off me for the first three months as they show me how well it works and then I’ll be desperate to pay them as much as they want. When I suggest that to marketing companies they seem absolutely aghast which now makes me believe that they don’t actually believe in what they’re selling and just want to move onto the next sucker who will pay some marketing money for a while before they realise it doesn’t work, give it up and then they move onto the next guy again.
In terms of the radio advertising we have embarked upon this year that is absolutely the case, the company and broadcaster that we use for radio advertising has no idea whatsoever how to count the adverts back in. They have no way of telling us that it might be working or not and actually seemed incredulous when we asked for this and were also incredulous when we asked for transmission reports to tell us when then adverts had actually gone out ‘why would we need those?’
Perhaps it’s our fault for not asking enough questions or understanding at the start but what we’re looking for are marketing people who believe what they do and are proven by results. I’ve come to the conclusion now that the difference between branding and marketing is a line on a spreadsheet - start spending the money on marketing and when you realise it hasn’t worked transfer it to the branding line and call it ‘brand awareness’ that way you can continue to spend marketing money as though you were some hot shot Apple executive and justify it on the grounds that you’re ‘sending your message to the masses’
In 1995 in Maxillofacial surgery the leeches didn’t work. The flaps fell off and the leeches vomited, there’s just a smell that in 2017 dental practice marketing is a little bit the same.
Blog Post Number - 1252
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