Ep. 3: Full-Arch Marketing: What You’re Not Being Told

Part 10:00

This is Podpopuli, podcast for the people. Hello and welcome to Beyond the Arches. I'm Dr. Daniel Noorthoek. With me today, we have Nicholas Glick. What's going on, Dr. Noorthoek? I'm doing well. How are you? Doing well. Can't complain. Do you know what we're talking about today? We're going to be talking about full-arch. And the problem of full-arch marketing, right? And so, first we're going to start today a little bit with, did you hear that Best Buy is doing a special on a 95-inch TV for $750, I think it was, delivered to your door?

No, I did not. Do you believe me? Honestly, it's not a bad deal. It's not a bad deal. No, so the problem with full-arch marketing is a little bit, which is what we're going to talk about today, is a little bit that some stuff... Some stuff that you hear can't be believed. And other stuff, like maybe if I said it was $1,500, it'd be more believable. And so, what we're talking about is, how do you navigate through that, right?

How do you tell if Dan's full of crap or not, right? How do you know if I actually have a 95-inch TV for $750? Yeah, the nice part is, as a consumer and buying TVs, you can look at BrandsMart, Best Buy, other sites. And dentistry is the Wild West. Every website you go to is... It's going to give you a different price point, different materials. You have no idea what you're even trying to shop for at that point.

Actually, yeah. I was just thinking, as you said, to stay on the TV thing. When you buy a Sony, you pretty much know it's a Sony. Unless you buy it on Black Friday, which might be that special label, right? Have you ever heard that they package it different? Or they make it a 45-and-a-half-inch TV, and so it's a different skew and not as quality? And I was just thinking that... How that relates is, that makes me... When I hear that, I don't buy TVs on Black Friday, not because they're not good deals, because I just don't...

That kind of makes me unsettled, right? There's no rules and regulations to it. You can't just buy a Sony on that day. So that's sort of the difficulty, right? And for us as a company, it's hard to kind of come from that and say, how do you get this message out to people, right? And we'll keep it more broad. Obviously, we have our own... We have our own stories, but one of the biggest difficulties is... ▶And this is another thing I was thinking about, is that it's unfair that a consumer that's never purchased this before has to see and sit and look through this marketing and has to wade through the information.

Not only do they have to educate themselves fully on what the heck this even is, but they also have to go out into the marketplace and say, okay, who's going to do it now? Right? And there's not a lot of people out there saying, well, we have a 5% failure rate, right? Because then anybody that says they have no failures ends up winning. And so you end up getting this marketplace that's only all shiny and nice, right?

Like another thing I was thinking about earlier today as I was kind of looking to come in here is, you know, there was actually a Porsche that like pulled out in front of me. And I was thinking like, if I went to a Porsche dealership and they said, there's only a 5% chance that it was going to have a massive problem or like a complication, that would be, they couldn't do that. They couldn't advertise anything. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I'm not buying that car. No. And, you know, at least you can do your research on Porsche from the beginning when they first started manufacturing to today's 911 models in comparison to, you know, full arch. ▶I don't know what an acrylic is versus, zirconia versus zirconia with a bar on it. There's a full skew of different products out there that really not much of a marketplace unless you're a dentist searching for what I can offer to a patient.

Yeah. So if you think about that, what we've just talked about so far in mind, how would you, just you, altruistically, done in one not related, think about yourself and like, how would you go out into the marketplace? Let's say you needed it and you lived in, Indiana, we'll go to your home state. You're living in Indiana. You need this. How would you even begin to filter that stuff out? Not knowing what you know now. Probably like any consumer, your first piece is going to be hopping on Google or Bing or something of that nature, doing a Google search, trying to see what full arch is and understanding what the definition of it really maybe even is.

However, to even get that word of full arch or full teeth replacement, you almost have to go to a dentist and kind of be diagnosed and have somebody tell you, oh, geez, your teeth are full of decay. You really need to get this removed or you're going to be a good candidate for full arch. And that's probably what would send you down that spiral of, oh, geez, I need to learn what full arch is. And then from there, you're going to get hit with, just like if you were buying a TV, you're going to type in full arch and you're going to get hit with the sponsored ads of, you know, Samsung, Vizio, Sony, all these different brands.

And it could be very misleading. On what you're trying to go about. And, you know, maybe it's like, you know, going to the TV reference again, maybe you're buying it for a family room or maybe you're buying it for a, you know, a second TV for outside or a den. And maybe the quality isn't as concerning for you. So as a consumer, it would be very difficult to kind of differentiate what you're even looking for without even having a baseline understanding of what materials even are.

So deeper than that, where, how does Nick, let's say you find Dr. Smith and you also go talk to Dr. Jones, like just truly like, like heartfelt, like what would you decide on? How, how would you make that choice? Cause I, cause I asked myself this question earlier as I was kind of thinking about it this morning and I couldn't really come up with an answer. Like it was, it was mostly answers that summated into the place that felt the best, that had the good reviews, you know, like, Yeah.

But it's a very difficult question to answer. Absolutely. It would probably come down to, you know, first, before I even called someplace, do they have good Google reviews? You know, that's kind of a baseline. And if you see something that's concerning, well, maybe I'm not calling them. But from there, and I said like maybe two, three different consultations, you've really no way to judge their clinical success or their clinical skills. You're really just going to go with the guy that made you, or, you know, the clinician that really made you feel comfortable through the process.

And that sat with, that sat with you, listened to you, that you actually spoke to a doctor through the process, instead of just feeling like you're another number that comes through their office. And that's actually, it's, this is actually a really fun podcast to run because it kind of makes us kind of review all of our stuff, right? Cause, cause you kind of start to introspect about, okay, well we're going to talk about marketing today and we market.

So, um, and that's what I, that's exactly what I kept coming to today. Like when I was thinking about like, how do you communicate? Like, how do you communicate? Like, how do you go with whoever feels good? And, you know, there's more stuff to it than just that, but that's like the overriding factor that I kind of came with. I was thinking like, you know, do you pick the one that seems the sexiest? No, because it just, it's probably, it might just seem the sexiest.

Do you pick one that takes the longest because the fastest is too, too short because that doesn't seem realistic. So you just take the longest one. No. And it kind of was all like Goldilocks kind of middle. And ultimately, I think it kind of just comes down to the, like to talk like the kids, the vibe, right? Yeah. The way that they feel and the way that everything feels around there, how the doctor interacts with the staff.

I mean, things to watch out for things to watch, uh, when you are responding to this marketing is, you know, did you, did you talk to a person that seemed to know that they were talking about? Did the person at the specific office, how did they, uh, handle you and treat you? But more, more than that, even when let's say you go to a zoom console or even go in person, um, how is that handoff, right? Does it seem cold and like, Hey, we're going to go find the doctor.

If we can find him, right. Um, doctors aren't, they're busy, but they're not that busy. You know, uh, my staff knows that I'm available pretty much anytime. How does that handoff happen? Does it feel warm? Does it, does it look warm? You know, um, does the, does the, does the doctor light up when they're talking about this kind of thing? You know, you know, very like sort of like not definable things as what I would choose on.

Yeah. You're almost making your decision not based on dentistry, but based on how you're treated as an overall human. Yeah. So we've kind of diverged into like the selection of it. Right. So, so then coming back to the problem with full arch, cause we haven't really talked too much about that. The problem really is that you can hire a really expensive video and company and you can hire a really expensive video and company and you can hire a person that comes up with your colors and such, and you can come up with whatever you want, uh, in terms of how fast you get teeth, et cetera.

Uh, but you can't fake the personal interaction, but the problem with it is that it's an appearance thing. It can, it can be an appearance thing and, and that marketing can get people kind of over their own skis. Right. Absolutely. And a lot of times it seems like the marketing company, is maybe making the decisions on the clinical care that a doctor is going to offer offer. Cause they need to, as a marketing company, you're only paid if you can bring patients in.

So it's a race to the bottom of, you know, okay, let's lower the price point as low as possible. So we can advertise a really cheap price. Cause that's going to get people. Yeah. Or let's, you know, market, you know,

Part 210:15

how fast we can do this process because, you know, maybe we can do it in 24 hours, 12 hours, something like that. Because then again, you can say, Hey fastest in, in Palm beach County to give you teeth. So you're really always trying as, you know, a dentist to probably differentiate yourself in some way. And you kind of forget that you're treating a human and you're a human and you need to treat somebody as you would want to be treated.

I mean, it's the classic golden rule. Yeah. And so to bring it to us, like what we've tried to do is sort of lay thick. Cause we would want to, we kind of both came to the same conclusion and didn't talk about this before at all, but we, that, that conclusion being that the human interaction. And so we try to make it so that when we get patients interest, that they have the openness to be able to contact patients via Facebook and such, and try to be a little bit more, more altruistic.

And like the other thing that comes with it too, is, and we're going to talk about this, I think like next episode is sort of like experience and, and how many arches and things that we've done and what that means for kind of the quality of the results. And that's a big part too. There's a lot of things that go into it. I mean, if you do one of these every three months, like I wouldn't let my own mother go to a place like that.

Sure. Could it get done and would it be safe and be okay? Probably, but maybe not. And the maybe not is bigger than, than where I would want them to go. Absolutely. And you're not. And as a patient, you really don't have an understanding of how many a doctor is doing of this. I mean, of course you can ask somebody, but if a doctor is about to get your money and they're not going to say, well, shoot, you're the first one I've done this year.

Right. So you really have to, you know, try to do your research as a patient to figure out what type of clinic am I going to? Is it a full large clinic? Is it a general dentistry clinic that's trying to mask themselves as a full large clinic? So there's so many different variables that as a consumer, I could see how you can get lost and throw your hands up and either say, okay, I'm just going to live with my teeth in this current decay fashion, or I'm just going to go to the local closest guy, cheapest guy, fastest guy, whatever it is.

And then you find yourself, you know, posting on Facebook saying, did I make the wrong decision? Am I stuck in this? Does the, do my teeth look natural to you? And that's usually a, you know, kind of a catastrophic place to be. Yeah. You just made me think of a story from dental school. ▶When we were in dental school, we had never done anything. And obviously the patients of the dental school know that we're pretty close to zero and they would, and they do it all the time.

They would stop us and say, how many of these have you done? And they used to, the little like locker joke or whatever was, you could say a number cause zero is still a number. And so you'd say, Oh, I've done a number of these, which was zero. Um, and that's not what you want. Right. Or, you know, there is a need for that. There's obviously somebody who's got to start somewhere. Um,

Part 313:16

but it's hard when you're trying to spend this amount of money, you know, it's hard to decipher whether or not that person, you're going to be able to do it. You're going to get extra care maybe cause they don't do too many. Maybe you're not going to cause they do too many. It's a very tough, it's almost one of the most difficult things I think is to sort of convey to a patient in a, in a not even workforce or a playing field in terms of advertising.

Um, cause it's unfair. You know, I spend more than most people that do it here and we'll say Boca and it's a little unfair that they don't get the chance. Right. And so they don't see as many. And it's, it all feeds into itself and you know, it's difficult. Uh, it's a very difficult, the marketing itself is very difficult. I will say as a positive, what I've sort of observed over time is that the, when teeth in a day was the thing that you advertised or teeth immediately or however you want to describe it.

Um, initially that was the big hook, right? ▶So people were doing the all on four, like we've talked about before, where we would, we take the teeth out, put the implants in, but we would just leave them in a denture for say three months. And when people started gluing these things together, they could advertise for, we could advertise for teeth in a day and that hit really hard. Right. And what I've seen over time is that sort of like become the norm.

It's like, uh, advertising a car like now with air conditioning. Well, um, of course they all come with air conditioning that those kind of like taglines of sort of like, faded out. Now the sexy one that's sort of a little bit on its way out as well is, is the digital branding right now, all digital and, and now immediate finals, right? That we've been part of that, that one we'll talk about really deep because that's where my bread and butter of the name and dentistry kind of came from.

But those things are all like the more people advertise for that stuff, they more, they kind of get dated and overused. And that's the positive is we're getting to this a little bit, maturity level of, of digital or full arch marketing. I'm sorry, where we've kind of run the end of those like buzzwords that just like are a little bit unfair, right? Cause for us, just to like, to tell the listeners, we don't do teeth on the same day for two very big reasons.

One, I don't want you in the chair any longer than you need to be. I want that to be a very easy, minimal surgery day. Um, and I don't want to torture you or, or risk not torture you risk not being able to get teeth cause they broke or something and force that patient to be in the chair for seven, eight hours and have it be a really bad experience. There are plenty of those. There's plenty of ones that go fine, but there's also plenty of those that kind of make it.

So it's just not a great thing that you can sell. The second reason is because we don't like the teeth being in the way of the, where that, um, injured site is going to bleed from that night. And we want you to be able to take, take your time one, be minimally traumatized from the experience, but to be able to manage the bleeding on your own. So you don't have to come back in the office for an emergency.

All that being said, the reason that that's not something that that just took me what, like three minutes to explain. Sure. That's not, you can't do that on a 32nd commercial. No. ▶And you can't advertise no teeth day one. That's not a sexy line by any means. Now with no teeth day one. Um, and so we do it for like a heavy reasoning and there are other people I'm sure that have equal reasoning on the other side for doing teeth in a day, but it is nice to finally getting beginning to the sort of like saturation and maturity rate where that's still going to, whether you say no teeth on the same day or teeth in a day, it's kind of just assume that you already kind of know what you're doing.

Cause it's been around a long enough that where maybe you both get the shot. And I think that that's where ultimately kind of everything's going to come down to. To your personal interaction with the staff and such. And that's, that's,

Part 417:26

that would be my number one. If I had a person call from, you know, Europe and say, Hey, we're going to get this done. I'm going to go to four places. How do I pick? I would tell them, pick something that looks like you're in a clean facility that everyone's happy to work there. Patients are happy, et cetera. And, and just kind of go on your gut. How do you feel with the doctor? Does the doctor feel like they're confident and competent, right?

There's two different things. Um, does the person, do they feel cocky enough that they're going to get good results, but not so cocky that they're like falsely in that, in that confidence. So there's a lot of things to weigh out, but I think it really just kind of go with your gut would be my number one advice, which really isn't a good rule to follow. I mean, it's a good rule to follow, but it's not, it's not like here's your three tips of the things that you should ask.

Sure. Uh, which is a little disappointing. Um, but I think that that would be, as I've thought through it, coming into this episode, like that was what I really wanted to hammer on is that's, it sounds, it seems like a cop out answer, but I, and we, you came to the same thing. Like I feel like that's the answer. Yeah. Cause I mean, in the, the reality that there are complications or something occurs, you want to be with somebody that is kind, compassionate and caring through the entire process and is going to treat you as a human and, and hear you out and not just brush you off as if you're another number, because, because there is a failure rate to full arch.

▶There is a failure rate to implants. There's a failure rate to, you know, higher, you know, any type of hybrid denture, whether that's nano ceramic, acrylic, zirconia, zirconia with a bar, all this stuff does have a possibility of breaking. So you want to be with someone that is able to be responsive to that, but also again, compassionate enough to say, Oh yes, Ms. Smith, you do have an issue here. Let's go ahead and address this together instead of, well, is the doctor even going to see me today?

Am I, just another number or I have to schedule out for two weeks because you guys are so busy. Like that's where I feel like patients will really start to feel like this buyer's remorse or this regret kind of sink in of, man, I picked the wrong place. Yeah. It's, it's really hard to ascertain why people are choosing you or what they choose on. And sometimes it can come out, you know, when we're doing a console, it can come out just in the, the random stuff like, Hey, I went to you.

Cause you, you use the color green and you're like, okay, how many people that like the color red didn't pick us. Right. Like some of the weirdest stuff can come out that, that you wouldn't ever think of. Um, which I guess is just true against all marketing. Like some people just don't like the color green or red, you know, it's just, it's tough to be able to kind of pitch yourself and for the professionals out there trying to kind of get into a full arch.

I mean, my recommendation would be, find a good reputable marketing company that's going to give you enough people to talk to. But at the end of the day, it's not about the volume of people that you talk to. It's how well you connect with those people. How will you like feel with those people and, and, and how good and how much they trust, like you're going to be there to hold, hold their hand through complications, which, you know, when, when I was in, um, Jacksonville, I, I learned, I learned a lot of lessons of things that I didn't want for done in one.

And one of those Bain ones was, it was really hard for me to, cause I didn't own the office. It was really hard for me. And this is also true for the other satellite type offices that I've done kind of one-off stuff work for. It was really hard for me to convey the negatives that the possible complications to them, even in person, um,

Part 521:16

because the staff wouldn't want to, or the owner didn't want to, because we might lose somebody. And it's been, it's been very freeing to once we get that marketing, once we get that patient in to be able to just say, look, here's the open book, here's the 5% chance that you're going to have something break or that you're going to have an implant go bad or not, or whatnot, because I have zero stress. And I would say my, the whole staff has zero stress when it comes to having a complication.

Yeah. And to that point, you know, I've, I've heard your consultations where, where you'll be an open book. You'll tell patients that there could be X, Y, Z problem or, Hey, your bone density isn't maybe up to speed where it should be. So there's going to be a little bit of risk involved with this. ▶And that's where I've always heard you say, like, go also have other consultations, feel out what the other clinicians say, because if you go to three clinics and the other two clinics say, Oh, you're a perfect candidate, no risk at all for this.

Well, that should be red flag central because are they just trying to get you to get you signed up today? Are they just trying to take your dollars from you because you're a candidate for this? Or are they really out there with your best interests in mind? Yeah. Um, one more story real quick. When, when I was in dental school, so complications has always been something that I've always really tried to be very transparent about because, uh, it makes me feel better for treating things in the future.

If there is an issue, right. I like to be able to treat things free and clear of any, like he didn't tell me that could happen. Right. But I've had that sort of feeling from the very beginning. So when we were in residency, we had to present cases that we just thought were interesting. They were something they could be person had an extra tooth or the implant we thought was going bad, but then it turns out it wasn't you name it, right.

Anything that you thought was interesting and was going to be beneficial to the group. And so after sitting through, we'll call it hundreds, tens and tens of these things, uh, once a week, ▶I kind of got sick of seeing like, here's my ideal space for an implant. Here's where we put the implant screw. This is how it healed perfectly. Right. And so I started to just show all of my, we'll call it bad cases, right. My complications, because those are way more interesting.

You learn a lot more. This is during residency. And I got to the point, maybe I did them. I don't know. Out of five of them, maybe I did like three complication lectures. We'll say. And to me, the other thing too, is that when you're in a learning environment, it stimulates that conversation. Anyway, my residency director pulled me aside after like the third one. I was like, you know, you're kind of getting a reputation that you've got complications going on.

You know, I hate that for you. You know, I see where you're kind of going, but like you should probably show your good stuff too. Cause you're a good surgeon. You do a good work. And it kind of hit me like, well, they can't, they just understand that I have really good cases and they're just kind of boring and I don't want to show them cause they're just kind of boring. And so that always kind of stuck with me and that we're in the same kind of situation.

I can't, we can't go on a 32nd commercial and both be sitting in the lab and say, Hey, today we want to talk to you about, uh, come to us because we have fractures in our zirconia. Everybody has fractures. Everybody has issues. We all live in a human body. Everybody gets infections. Um, it's the amount that you have. You want to be as minimal as possible, but you also want to be able to overcome and handle those.

And as a person trying to select it, they want to select the recommendation is select somebody that you know is going to be able to handle it, that has handled it before that told you this might happen. All those things are going to come into play way more than how many dollars did they charge you? Um, how many, you know, even if you feel that way with somebody that sat with you 10 minutes and somebody sat with you for an hour, but didn't tell you about any complications.

Part 625:29

Like those are all factors that need to go into this decision, right? Don't make a decision on the color of the marketing, make a decision on gut feeling and, and other patients and talking to them. And how real do those patient interviews seem? Right. One thing that I hope to convey when we're going through these things and, and, and bringing patients in as guests is how comfortable do they seem with the staff and, and with us like that we want to convey that sort of personal relationship and that comfort because you see a lot of these advertisements.

I saw one today and it was just a video of a, almost like a duet with a zoom guy. And he was like, I wish I made my choice sooner. And all of this stuff that you would give him as a, as a, um, script. And maybe it works. It just, it feels so disingenuous to me. I just, it feels icky and I don't like it. So for me, I'm a little bit encouraged with full arch marketing to see it sort of just be assumed almost like, like lawyers, right?

Personal injury lawyers. Maybe there was a point at some point where that was unique. Like, Oh, I do have, I did have spinal fusion in my eighties in the eighties. And, and I do have that neck pain. I didn't know there was a guy for that. Now we just assume that's there. And it's kind of a dime or dozen. And it's, it's just a luck of whoever you call. So hopefully maybe that kind of is what ends up both for the little guy, um, and us, right?

Like just more exposure in the marketplace and getting people educated to the point where they can make that decision on the gut. I think is what really like matters and is the take home. Absolutely. You want people to make decisions based on other people and real human interaction. So yeah. And reviews are the number one thing in the, in the game. You want to hear that, that somebody else had, you know, in the similar kind of situation was able to overcome it and have good results comparatively to, well, this guy has no reviews whatsoever, but well, I guess I'm going to be the first one and everybody has to start out there.

But you made a comment earlier about being fair to other, you know, dental offices or clinicians, but it's kind of like to make a poor analogy for an NFL team, but nobody wants to see the backup quarterback go in the game. Everybody wants to trust the all-star, you know, Tua or Jared golf. Nobody wants to see Skyler Thompson in the backfield. So, you know, you want to go to the guy that delivers that has success that has had repeated success and can get you there comparatively to taking a leap of faith with somebody.

And, you know, maybe it works out, maybe it doesn't. Well, that's not something you take, you do with your healthcare. There's always a Tom Brady sitting on the backup bench. That's the unfortunate thing. ▶You can never make that total decision, but if you have to make the decision, you may not have pulled, Tom Brady off of the, off the backup bench. There's, there's plenty of guys that do not turn into Tom Brady. And that's, it's going to be really easy to, to kind of knock on people that haven't done a lot.

There are really skilled surgeons out there. They're really good teams. They're really good prosthodontists, really good general dentists.

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And so I think it really just kind of comes down to that. Like what is the, what is the reputation? What are the other patients that have been treated? What was their experience like? And what kind of experience do they have to, to make that, that play in the, in the end? Absolutely. So as we wrap up here, I'm going to, I'm going to put you on the spot for like two seconds. I'm going to, you've been here from the beginning.

So give me in your idea, just, you may not be able to come up with anything, but what is the, what do you think, what do you consider as the worst thing in marketing that we've ever done? If you, if you have a funny story or something that comes to mind, worst thing in marketing, what's the worst move or accident or, or a mistake we ever made in marketing? Probably from the very beginning, trying to say we can do teeth in 48 hours or 24 hours or something like that.

Just from the perspective that ones, if you don't get it right in 48 hours, ones, if you don't get it right in 24 hours, and now this patient has this false sense of hope that they're going to leave your clinic with the best possible set of teeth and forever, you know, they'll never have to come back to a clinic again comparatively to where we're at. Now today where we're trying to sell an experience, we're trying to sell, you know what this product will be.

▶Not today, not tomorrow or in 48 hours, but in the lifetime when in your next 20 years that you'll have a smile that's customized for you. So I think we really missed the boat trying to sell a price point and trying to sell the time instead of trying to sell an experience and what, you know, ultimately those teeth would, would result in for, for a patient. Yeah. That the, the time, the, the part part about the time was, it means different things to different people, right?

You can get a set of teeth in by the end of the day from surgery. We could back then and we can today. It's all a perception of what is the, what is the quality? What is the look? What is the color? What did the patient think? What did they want? And they're thinking you're going to get a perfect and you got it. What you thought was perfect. Those, may not match up. I agree. Well, we appreciate everybody listening.

Do you have any final thoughts or anything like that? No. I mean, on today's message, you know, is do your research, make sure that you pick a, you know, a team of clinicians that care about you, staff that cares about you, but ultimately do what's best for yourself and don't jump to a single piece. It's like buying a car. You don't want to go buy the first car that you test drive. There might be other bells and whistles out there that you didn't even know about.

So doing your research, research is, is paramount in this and any healthcare kind of procedure, but especially when you're coming into full arch, where it's such a saturated market of full arch marketing, that it's really tough to differentiate anything. Yeah. Full mouth replacement now with air conditioning. Yeah.

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Backup camera mandatory. Exactly. Well, we appreciate you listening. Like subscribe, follow, submit your questions. Like we've, we've said before. And we look forward to, to having another discussion and listening in the future. Thanks for having me doc. Thank you.