Issue 1 - January 2005

Physician, heal thyself
Better marketing starts with a clearer message
By G.B. Veerman

Let’s not mince words: You look awful. You are carrying around way too much flab in the middle. And you haven’t attempted vigorous exercise since you left school.

This isn’t a script for your next patient evaluation. It’s me talking to your marketing.

If you are like most chiropractors, you either neglect your marketing, try to ignore it or pretend it really doesn’t matter that much until — ouch! — one day something snaps and you feel the pain — right there, in the bottom line of your practice.

If you don’t believe me, just thumb through the local newspaper and evaluate the advertising you and your colleagues place. Compare the quality of those communications to the quality (in terms of intelligence, sophistication, esthetics and production values) you appreciate in ads for national brands you know and love.

The ads for chiropractors show a “lack of vigorous exercise.” They are filled with intellectual and creative “flab.”

Fortunately, you can do something about this situation. It starts with an adjustment today and an extended program of therapy to restore your practice — and perceptions on marketing it — to health and vitality.

This therapeutic approach does not use gimmicks. Nor does it employ connect-the-dots formulas. What it uses are principles that you need to apply when you set out to change the overall condition of your communications and to evaluate a potential marketing partner.

MIXED MESSAGES

Before you can correct a problem, you have to understand it. The problem with chiropractic marketing is that chiropractic has been its own worst enemy.

The profession contradicts itself with two mutually exclusive propositions:

• On the one hand, it wants to be seen on the same level — both in terms of credibility and professionalism — as traditional medical approaches to health.

• On the other hand, chiropractic wants to define itself against mainstream medicine (and has succeeded in this). It has created for itself an insular sub-category of healthcare.

In other words: Chiropractic wants to be held in the same esteem as the mainstream, but it has deliberately positioned itself outside of the mainstream.

That’s a confusing set of messages. For the public, at best, it does little to combat social stereotypes about chiropractors.

At worst, it reinforces the public’s individual reluctance — however rational or irrational — to embrace chiropractic medicine. For the profession as a whole, this creates drag at a moment rich with opportunity to expedite wider embrace of chiropractic — and a more transparent integration with mainstream healthcare.

The result? A pathological inward focus that represents a rut in messages that creates — or at least accepts — artificial distinctions between options in healthcare.

THE SOLUTION?

The good news is that perceptions on chiropractic care have changed enormously. According to the National Institutes of Health, 36 percent of American adults use some kind of complementary or alternative medicine, a category that includes chiropractic, which was among the top ten alternative medical treatments. Mainstream Americans have an interest in noninvasive, nontraditional healthcare.

Wider acceptance of chiropractic is arguably a result of larger social forces in play that have inspired consumers to seek alternatives to pharmaceutical or surgical solutions to health issues.

To make a powerful connection with patients that compliments this movement — and matches the same intellectual and visual excellence of successful brands — chiropractic marketing must get out of its old ruts.

Marketing must shift the conversation from the question “why chiropractic?” toward a more mainstream discussion on healing, health, vitality and strength — or even a different subject. Whatever the message, it must resonate with the vigorous dialog of the day on healthcare.

How can you do this?

Place yourself at the center of the American conversation on health and wellness, not on the sidelines. And line up with other credible, attractive and widely embraced currents in health and wellness.

Should you manage this radical undertaking, you will connect more credibly with more patients more of the time. And you’ll differentiate your own practice from those who don’t.