The Pizza and your Dentistry

If the title of this article has piqued your curiosity for reading; great; I confess here a mea culpa, to draw your attention to a very interesting topic about the reality of many dentistry professionals, a behavior that, if for now is a trend in the profession, on the other hand, may be hindering the growth of many professionals and often frustrating their relationship with the profession and with dentistry.

Imagine someone who has opened a pizzeria and after some time, noticing that their restaurant is not growing and thus, in the search for an answer, they believe they need to improve their sauce and with this conviction, they go in search of a specialization course to create the best pizza sauce for their restaurant. After some time, even with the new sauce, things are still not happening as he imagined, maybe the problem is the fact that he is not a specialist in doughs and thus, he goes for a new specialization. The analogy above, changing the owner of the pizzeria to the dentist in his office, is that today we live the same loop in the search for ultra-specialization and it is exactly this aspect that I would like to address in this article.

Just as it happened in Medicine, Dentistry has experienced a growth in demand for specializations in the last 20 years, that is, by the segmentation of knowledge from a practice of the profession to a specific niche of knowledge, which I understand to be natural as new technologies and the development of knowledge advance by leaps and bounds. To make my point clear, yes, I am in favor of the professional seeking a specialization in the area in which he is most proficient, the market needs that today and this is a fact that should not be disregarded in your career. While the term General Practitioner is almost falling into disuse to the point that every professional necessarily needs to be a Specialist in something, saying that you are a General Practitioner is almost like putting yourself in a condition of inferiority before other colleagues, which is a very big illusion, despite the feeling that hangs in the air.

We currently see many dentists stacking one specialization after another, not for a purpose, but often for an illusion that it will make them complete, or that it will improve their "sauce". There are also those who see Specialization as a "fad", that is, if that is the trend that is attracting patients and people say they are making money, that's where I'll go... and so came the specializations in Facets, Aligners, Buccal Fat Pad Removal, HOF, among others. I recognize that this may work for some people, but the perspiration is very great and walks on a fine line to frustration.

For some time now, I no longer work in an office since I chose to follow my path in the Industry, but still I receive many queries from people asking for dentist recommendations and one of the points I hear the most is the search for a trustworthy professional, who can't stand going to clinic A or B where they are always attended by a different person, or always referred to another professional. The point is that the Family Dentist has disappeared, the General Practitioner has disappeared, that trusted person who accompanied you and attended to everyone in the family is becoming increasingly rare to find.

At this point, I draw attention to the fact that "improving the sauce", that is, the key to professional growth, may not be in the tireless pursuit of specializations, but rather in looking more closely at your service and also at your audience. There are two concepts in Marketing that I always like to highlight that relate to two acronyms, ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and USP (Unique Selling Proposition), which basically concern identifying your ideal consumer profile and what is your biggest selling attribute, that is, what differentiates you and your business from all others (in a brief description, of course). The point is that to define this you need to interact with your consumers in order to map the perception they have of your clinic and of you. Understanding how you are seen as a professional will help you work on the customer journey so that they identify that you are the best choice among several options that could perform the same service (even paying more for it).

Touching a bit on Service and drawing a parallel to another market, the transportation service; what leads people to choose an Uber X; Select or Black?; certainly the Select and Black niches exist for adding values that are connected to the driver and his equipment (in this case the car), and this must meet some attributes and consequent generation of value for your consumer. The parallel with Uber as a service provider is interesting; because people tend to pay more for comfort; safety, and convenience. Is it the same in Dentistry's case, that is, have you ever stopped to evaluate what are the attributes that add value to the consumer in your clinic so that they perceive your service as X, Select or Black? In this case, does the number XYZ of Specialties connect or score in this perception?

The inspiration for this text came from a conversation with some colleagues and one of them commented that he was going to start his 3rd Specialization, but when he told the news the feeling was that it came out as a tone of weariness and frustration for restarting studies not on purpose, but as an obligation or because it is the path he recognizes he needs to take to fill something that is missing in his career for his clinic to grow. My perception is that he was a great professional, but I realize how incomplete he sees himself and it is as if he were looking for the ticket to Pasárgada (referring to the dear poem by Manuel Bandeira). My advice to my colleagues is, we will never stop studying, but be careful where you put your "silver bullet", it is not real, so seek your purpose, have goals and indicators, listen to your customers, generate trust with them, pay attention to the journey and map the ICP and your USP and thus you will improve your sauce, your dough, your pizzas, and the flavor of your Dentistry will never be the same again.