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Branding Your Aesthetic Practice

What Does Your Personal Brand Say About You?

Have you thought of yourself as the best in your field in your community?  Or the best surgeon for specific cosmetic procedures, such as liposuction or blepharoplasty?  Or even the best cosmetic urologist in your hometown?  Do your patients see you as the superstar and do they know about your specific areas of expertise? If not, you need to build a more cohesive image using branding.  Branding is the art of attracting your preferred patients using very specific messaging that will get their attention.

What is Branding?

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.

Branding is actually more than that.  It’s everything you do to attract and maintain quality aesthetic patients.  Branding is not sales. Branding is emotionally attracting the type of aesthetic patient you want in your practice who chooses you over your competition.  Your personal brand is who you are, what you do, and your leading attribute in the eyes of your preferred target market.

Branding: Hype or Sales?

Branding is more critical than marketing or sales.  Branding is influencing and changing the way people think.  Branding appeals to desire and touches emotions.  The goal is to emotionally predispose potential patients into entering into a relationship with you because they believe you are the best choice – for them.

With more information at their fingertips, today’s aesthetic consumers are too sophisticated and skeptical to be sold.  They want to arrive at their own decision on their own terms.  Branding is helping them get there.  Branding “pre-sells” your expertise, or you, before the patients even meet you.  These potential patients call to make an appointment because of the aura or the impression that you have created that you are, indeed, the best at what you do.  They also believe they will receive outstanding care from you and your staff.

Branding offers you an opportunity to sculpt your practice exactly as you would like.  Your brand can attract only cash-paying patients, patients of a certain demographic such as age or location, exactly the procedures or problems that you would like to treat and the problems or conditions where you truly are the expert, and finally, the patients that provide you with the greatest satisfaction of providing them your medical care and expertise.

Just as successful practices have a mission statement that serves as motivation to their staff and a guarantee to their patients, a brand is your opportunity to declare your promise to your patients about the outstanding service that you will provide them.

Attract and Maintain Your Preferred Patients

So, how do you become your preferred patient’s first choice as their doctor even before they need an aesthetic procedure?  First you attract, and then you maintain quality patients who have had a positive experience with you and your practice.

Attracting and maintaining quality patients happens by promising to give your patients a stellar medical experience.  Then, they return to you again and again, and they brag about you to their friends, creating invaluable word-of-mouth buzz. If you are in a competitive environment, you need to attract patients by creating visibility for you and your practice.  Frankly, your visibility brings more prospective patients to you, but your ability to keep them depends on the quality of service you provide them when they are with you, when they interact with your staff, and during their recovery.  So, your name, as well as your face, needs to be circulating in the community in a tasteful, professional way that your preferred patient base will see.

Your Patient’s Perception is Your Reality

Branding is all about perception. And, visibility builds credibility in the eyes of your prospective aesthetic patients. If they see something in the media a few times, it sounds familiar to them and they get the impression it must be good.  When prospective patients recognize you and say to themselves, “gosh, he looks familiar”, you are well on your way.  All things being equal… the more visible you are the more likely you will attract patients to your practice. Patients want to feel comfortable with their choices and familiarity breeds that comfort.

Your patients’ and prospective patients’ perception is your reality, and they define their decision to go to you versus all the others due in large part to your branding.  They have made this decision, not based on real evidence, but on their decision that you are the best choice for them. They did not get to that choice using logic – they made the decision emotionally and then justified their decision with logic. Perhaps they saw you on the news or they saw your photo in the social column at a fundraiser or their friend passed along the informative newsletter you distributed to your patients.  It can be the monthly column you write for a local magazine or publication or your appearance on the local news where you are interviewed about a new procedure or treatment that you offer your patients.  Branding also occurs if you sponsor a health-related event such as walk or run to cure a specific kind of cancer.  Also branding occurs when your website is at the top of the search engine list on Google or Yahoo.

Today it is too competitive to rest on your laurels. Your name needs to stay in front of your preferred patient base so they visit you whether they have a present aesthetic need now or in six months or next year.  You cannot assume they will stay loyal to you if you do not keep your relationship current with them.  If you are not visible – you give your competitors the opportunity to redirect your patients to their practices.

Tips to Create Your Medical Brand:

• Be sure your patients know why you are unique such as board certification or advanced medical skills or experience.
• Tell your patients what you offer that most of your competitors don’t-you offer evening and Saturday morning appointments, or 24-hour recovery support.
• Do things differently to stand out-you provide transportation for your patients to and from your office or the hospital
• Clearly convey your personality in your marketing tools-you can portray yourself as the “Top Doc to the Stars” or “The Local Neighborhood Doc”
• Specialize and be selective
• Be where your prospective patients are-you have offices in various parts of the community or region where your preferred patients live
• Build rapport and trust with every patient-use the patient’s name when speaking to them in person or over the telephone
• Stay in contact with your patients throughout the year-send them a practice newsletter, birthday cards, and thank you notes when they refer a patient to you
• Refine your patient relations processes-have your staff introduce themselves by name to new patients and then walk all new patients from the reception area to the exam rooms

For those physicians who take branding seriously, the payoff could be huge.  The difference between a good practice and a great practice is in the details.  Pay attention to every aspect of you, your staff and your practice to ensure it is consistent with your personality and the image you are trying to portray.

Don’t think of branding as taking patients from your colleagues or your competitors.  Think of branding as the opportunity to have your existing patients and potential new patients to think of only you as the one that can treat their cosmetic problem or condition.

Getting started to brand your practice

For this process you will need to gather your staff and conduct a brainstorming session.  You begin by writing down what you want to achieve and whom you want to serve.  For example if you want to specialize in facial plastic surgery, then write down the ages of patients you want to treat, the nature of the problems that you want to treat, and the ability of this patient population to pay for your services.

You need to think about the well-trained staff that you will need to have in place to achieve these goals so that patients can conduct all of their care at one facility and not have to go to the consultation in one building, their surgery in another location, and then go through post-operative care in still another office.

You have to identify your competitors.  Don’t think just of your local competitors, but also consider those in the region, the rest of the nation, and depending upon areas of expertise you may want to consider your global competitors.  For example, practices who want to attract patients from all over the world to come to their country for aesthetic procedures which are significantly cheaper than the same procedure performed in America, are setting up medical tourism industry in their countries.  They are making it possible for patients to have visas, airline reservations, hotel reservations before and after their surgery and even doctors who will participate in the post operative care once they return to their home towns.  This concept is branded to make it not only less expensive, but to make it hassle-free for patients who are willing to have surgery in such a setting.

How are you different from the competitors?  What is it that makes you unique from those who offer the same services?  There is an aesthetic practice in New Orleans that is branding itself to provide bariatric surgery care for patients from South America, a form of reverse tourism.  They have Spanish-speaking doctors and staff; they meet patients at the airport and provide them transportation to the medical center.  They essentially choreograph every aspect of the patient’s care and provide outstanding customer services in addition to the clinical skills of caring for the patient.

You want to make a list of the unique benefits that patients might experience from being a patient in your practice. There is an aesthetic practice that specializes in cosmetic surgery for men and they are able to evaluate the  patient in one visit, provide computerized before and after images, have a discussion on the options, obtain the consent, and do the pre and post op teaching on the very first visit.  This is compared to other  practices who do not provide computerized before and after images, miss opportunities to listen to an address the patients concerns, or lose a client simply because they do not know how to treat a male versus female patient.  This practice has branded itself as a one-stop shop for the male aesthetic patient, who is often ignored by other aesthetic practices.

Regarding your brain-storming session, it is important in the first session to avoid any judgments on those who offer suggestions.  You want to have as many unfiltered ideas and thoughts offered at this first brainstorming session as possible to work from.

Slogan development

A slogan is a short, memorable catch phrase, tagline or motto used to identify a product or company in advertisements in marketing and practice promotion. Many think that having a catchy slogan as a necessary ingredient of branding.  Yes a slogan is a helpful but far more important to have a branding concept that you can deliver rather than a slogan that is on the tip of the tongue of your patients and potential patients.  Assuming that the message is in place and is implemented by the providers and the staff, then the slogan might be the next step that is created.

There are slogans that can be recited by nearly every child and adult.  Examples are: Nike’s Just do it, Budweiser’s This bud’s for you, or Avis’s We try harder.

Your slogan must be easy to remember.  You want the slogan to be able to be recalled so that the slogan can be repeated to others.  Al Reis describes 4 methods to create a memorable slogan.( http://www.stickyslogans.com/allriesstickyslogans.html)  1) Rhyme and rhythm.   A political example is “Tippercanoe and Tyler Too” used by William Harrison in 1840 and “All The Way With LBJ” (Lyndon Johnson 1964) is another example using rhyme to make the slogan memorable. This gives a ring to slogan and will help it stick in the memories of those that hear or read it.  2) Reversals.  It is true in romance and also in slogans, opposite attracts.  Probably the most famous of all is by William Shakespeare, “To be or not to be” or Revlon’s “Fire and Ice”. 3) Double entendre.   This technique makes your slogan vibrate between the two meanings.  Morton salt’s “When it rains, it pours” and John Deere’s “Nothing runs like a Deere” are two examples.  4) Alliteration.  Perhaps Mars’ slogan for M and Ms, “Melts in your mouth and not in your hands” is the best example of alliteration.

The slogan should also describe one of the key benefits of using your service or your practice.  A urology practice in California brands itself as offering “Same Day – Next Day Urology Appointments”.  This practice is trying to differentiate itself as being very accessible to potential new patients.  Mayo clinic uses branding to emphasize its commitment to patients by declaring “Mayo Clinic- Putting Patients First”.  The University of Miami Medical Center offers state of the art delivery of health care by declaring “Delivering Tomorrow’s Cure Today”.

If possible, the slogan should describe your uniqueness and how it sets you apart from your competitors.  Finally a slogan could have a twinge of humor or chuckle that makes the listener smile.  Again this makes it more memorable and repeatable. A food delivery service created the slogan of “Our food is fresh; only our customers are spoiled” which combines humor and reversal.

Bottom Line:  Branding is the opportunity to create an image of your practice that will result in patients thinking of you and your practice when they need your services.  Creating a brand requires identifying the uniqueness of your practice and how you are differentiated from others in your community and region.  Then you need to make sure that your practice delivers on your brand and that there is a consistency between your brand and your performance.

Examples of successful slogans:

“Committed to making a difference.” Merck

“Promises made. Promises kept.” Community Health Systems

Merck & Co., pharmaceutical company?Advertising slogan: Merck. Where patients come first.

Yamanouchi?Slogan: Yamanouchi. Creating and Caring… for Life.

Astellas Pharma?Advertising slogan: Astellas. Leading Light for Life.

Janssen-Cilag, research-based pharmaceutical company?Ad slogan: Janssen-Cilag. Your partner in integrated health care.

GlaxoSmithKline company?Tagline: GlaxoSmithKline. Do more, feel better, live longer.

Schering pharmaceutical company, Germany?Marketing slogan: Schering. Making medicine work.

Polpharma, the largest Polish manufacturer of drug products?Tagline: Polpharma. People helping people.

Sandoz, a world leader in generic pharmaceuticals?Advertising slogan: Sandoz. A healthy decision.

Fougera, manufacturer of multi-source topical pharmaceuticals?Advertising slogan: Fougera. Make No Compromises.

Stiefel Laboratories, skin care pharmaceutical company?Advertising slogan: Stiefel. Research in Dermatology.

Mayo Clinic- Putting Patients First

Catherine Maley,

Author, Your Aesthetic Practice

(877) 339-8833

www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com

About the Author

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