Universal marketing principles from 3 decades in healthcare and legal marketing
1. Everything is temporary
When I started Vanguard Communications in my second bedroom in 1994, there was no internet and no email, and I got two local newspapers delivered to my doorstep daily. They weighed about five pounds together. Bill Clinton was in his second year as president, and Taylor Swift was a toddler. EVERY business must not only adapt to but embrace change. That philosophy is what led me to choose the word vanguard for my new company name.
2. Great organizations embrace change
The greatest lead it. Doctors, lawyers and other professionals are trained to succeed through conformity. But entrepreneurs succeed through some degree of nonconformity. Author Rita Mae Brown: “The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.” To build a lasting legacy in your career, make your own path and leave a trail.
3. Only weak organizations need fear competitors
Strong ones are grateful for them. Competitors can teach more about what you should do every day than any school.
4. Failure is temporary. So is success.
Failing forward is the secret to the most successful organizations.
Thomas Edison: “I make more mistakes than anyone else I know, and sooner or later, I patent most of them.”
5. Nothing great can be accomplished without enthusiasm
The older and more comfortable we get, the easier it becomes to accept stasis, comfort and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sagacious advice. But for the happiest and most successful of us, life is a job that’s never quite finished.
6. People who ask the most questions are the brightest and most interesting
And rarest. In my observations, they make up about 10% of the population. Yet they possess perhaps most of the wisdom.
7. Knowing what to do matters less than how many times you’ve done it
Know-how is what makes a living for professionals. The best are usually those who’ve done it longest. My father was a university professor of education. His saying: “Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach. And those who cannot teach, teach teachers.” (I actually have great respect for academicians.)
8. Bosses don’t realize how much they scare employees
This has been perhaps the hardest lesson for me. I learned it mostly by hearing many times through the grapevine what employees said they heard versus what I remember saying.
9. Facial expression and tone of voice may say more about your message than words
It took years of bitter lessons (see above) to learn to focus resolutely on them as much as the verbal message.
10. You can never be too clear
A doctor taught me that precious lesson decades ago. Sadly, lawyers, doctors and other highly educated professionals too often lose sight of the curse of knowledge – i.e., the immense gap between their expertise and the layperson’s understanding.
Albert Einstein: “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t really understand it yourself.”
Marketing principles from Mark Twain, O.J. Simpson & Coddies Fish Flip Flops
11. There’s no such thing as dumbing it down
Mark Twain: “We’re all ignorant, only on different topics.” I’ve found that lawyers, doctors and other highly educational folks are often too proud to admit their lack of understanding of other fields – especially information technology. If you want the respect of another professional, don’t make him or her ask for clarification.
12. People look for healthcare and legal information first
and doctors and lawyers second. By a ratio of 8:1, more internet searches are for health information than for healthcare providers – about 7% of ALL internet searches. Similarly, more than 42,000 internet searches are for law information EVERY DAY.
13. Humans make most purchase decisions with their hearts
and then justify them with their heads. How else do you explain the popularity of the Tesla Cybertruck and the Coddies Fish Flip Flops?
14. Given a choice of the most familiar or the most effective,
people will generally select the most familiar. This why McDonald’s, Starbucks and Microsoft are category leaders despite not making the best hamburgers, coffee and software.
15. In healthcare, patients pay many times more attention to who’s listening to them
than where their doctors went to medical school.
16. For patients, great customer service can overcome mediocre healthcare outcomes,
but not vice versa.
17. To keep customers or patients for the long haul,
it’s not enough to be good at what you do. You must also be emotionally memorable. The famous maxim: “People may forget what you said but never how you made them feel.”
18. Reputation is like wealth:
it usually takes years to acquire but can disappear in a flash. Just ask O.J. Simpson, Bill Cosby, cyclist Lance Armstrong, and former presidential candidates John Edwards and Gary Hart.
19. Economics, technology, and consumer knowledge and preferences evolve endlessly
Medical and legal practices that resist evolution are committing slow suicide. Imagine a doctor refusing to adapt to electronic health information systems or a lawyer who still looks up court decisions in books instead of online.
20. Cost isn’t what matters to consumers
Value is. Real or imagined value is why people pay twice as much for an Apple Watch as a Fitbit despite the latter’s arguably equal or better features.
Power of story telling, brand & managing people assets
21. Patients and legal clients make life affecting decisions based equally or less on thinking
than by gut feeling. A scan of online reviews of doctors and lawyers demonstrates this.
22. Customers don’t buy the products and services of a company
or organization. They buy the values the products and services stand for. The power of values is what built the brands of Nike (ultimate sports performance), Rolex (enduring elegance) and Rolls Royce (indestructible luxury).
23. A strong brand is 100 times more powerful than mission, vision and value
statements. While Southwest Airlines has a mission and vision statement (“a heart for service”), its success as the nation’s largest domestic airline is largely based on free baggage checking.
24. Words and pictures can help you understand a brand
Poetry and paintings can help you feel it. Examples: The five Olympic rings symbolizing unity of five continents; the NASA logo in a space-age font; and the Target dog with painted circles around its eye.
25. Products and services don’t sustain businesses;
culture does. Competitors can copy your products, but they can’t copy your culture. Long known for its commitment to the environment, the founder of clothing retailer Patagonia donated the nearly $3 billion company to environmental projects and organizations.
26. Employees don’t quit bad jobs or bad bosses
They quit bad environments. People often leave their jobs when their supervisors don’t care that they’re overworked, take credit for their work, micromanage them, play favorites in the office, and aren’t open to constructive ideas.
27. The most successful businesses don’t talk to customers about their business
They talk to their customers about customers. Every business owner and manager should keep the WIIFM principle foremost in communications with customers: What’s in it for me?
28. It’s 10 times easier to entertain someone than to educate him
Storytelling – not lecturing – is how Mr. Rogers taught generations of children about tolerance of others, racial equality, and the importance of personal responsibility, among other life lessons.
29. Businesses don’t fail because they were reaching the wrong people
with their marketing messages, but plenty fail because they send the wrong messages to the right people. For medical practices and most law firms (excepting perhaps very large personal injury firms), this is why mass media advertising wastes 90% or so of its costs – you pay truckloads of cash for a billboard or TV commercial to reach people who don’t need you at that moment in time.
30. Employees are an organization’s greatest assets,
and asset management is the boss’s most important job – one that is never finished or perfected. In our experience, it usually takes at least a year to recruit and train top job performers to the point they earn their keep in costs to date. As a legendary advertising executive reputedly said, in any professional services company the inventory goes down the elevator every night.
Put all this marketing wisdom to work for your medical or law practice
Throughout our 30 years of marketing history, we’ve always offered a growth guarantee in the first year of our services or we work for free. We have never had to work for free.