A brand and its ability to influence consumer behavior is based upon the customer experience, rather than solely on the marketing and promotional activities behind it.
Big business strategies don’t work for an aesthetic practice. While it may be true that huge global companies that market direct to consumer have highly-recognizable brand names, this is not really relevant in a solo or even group practice with one location. The implication is that small businesses should be spending big bucks on branding and marketing to try to replicate the success of these mega national or global consumer brands.
The problem with this is that the best practices of large corporations trivializes the differences between small firms and large ones. Watching what big brands do is interesting, but the rules under which they operate are simply not applicable to a solo cosmetic practice which is basically a small business. Do you have a marketing and design department? Budget with multiple zeros? In house IT expertise? The ability to hire multiple vendors to help make your marketing sizzle?
Large companies like Apple, Nike, Coca Cola, McDonald’s, and the other ubiquitous logos that self-proclaimed “branding experts” pull out as examples, tend to be similar in terms of their corporate structure and the way they are run. The typical pecking order is a Board, a Chairman, CEO and President and a slew of VPs or Directors underneath them. Sound familiar? I highly doubt it.
An aesthetics clinic that offers service like every other clinic does will have a hard time competing on the basis of branding alone. Branding activities – like TV ads for example – can be an expensive mistake because that budget might be better spent elsewhere. The best and most effective way for a clinic to differentiate itself is by offering something that not everyone else can offer: personalized 5-star service.
Customer loyalty and a growing customer base wont emerge from branding exercises alone. It has to evolve from the quality of the product/services on offer, how easy you make it for the customer to make a purchase, and customer satisfaction that stimulates them to refer their friends and talk about you.
Now this does not mean that you do not need a good name and attractive logo, color palette and clinic design by any means. That is also part of being in the business of aesthetic medicine. Your image should confirm the customer’s hope that they have come to the right place.
