Hey, everyone. Have you heard about the Smile Direct News?
So anyone who was dissatisfied with their service and got their money back, had to sign an NDA saying they wouldn't talk about their problem with the service.
So that has been ruled against the law by the courts.
And now 17,000 people are gonna be able to have the right to talk about how dissatisfied they were with small direct service.
17,000 people, small direct had to pay $500,000 as a fine because they were violating consumer protection laws.
They didn't admit to any wrongdoing.
It was a settlement, but we have a ton of dissatisfied people who probably have been wanting to talk about this and now they're going to, so how can we use this to help grow our practice?
Let's look at a few ways we could do that. All right.
For one, the obvious one is small. Direct club's reputation is taking a hit.
So you could talk about how good your reputation is in the community, how important reputation is, etcetera.
You could just have some branding messaging about the importance of reputation, reputation and trust, et cetera.
Any time a big competitor like this is gonna have a hit to their reputation, it provides a little bit of an opportunity.
Right. And of course, we want to talk about personalized care compared to a male order orthodontics.
Obviously, you have patients working with you and orthodontics who's been trained and they're getting personalized care specifically to fit their needs that is very safe and effective.
So you can highlight that personalized care. All right. So another obvious one is the professional supervision.
You're the doctor, the orthodontist who is supervising the entire procedure.
So you're making sure that the person is safe, they're getting effective treatment, they're getting what they want.
And there's no fear involved. If these people hear these nightmare stories, they might be afraid of what potentially could happen during treatment to improve their smile.
And because you're the professional overseeing everything, you're gonna make sure that doesn't happen.
And we're talking about messaging, we could do this in ads, digital or traditional on your website, collateral, et cetera.
All these places could have the messaging that helps differentiate you from these mail order services.
I think a big one is transparency and trust, trust. Obviously.
Um I really feel like smile direct here has violated the trust by not letting people speak their minds and constraining them just to get a refund for poor service.
I mean, I think that's very bad.
You could discuss the importance of trust in the community, maybe you've been part of the community for a long time.
You've done a lot of great things with nonprofits, et cetera.
You've just been helping people in the community for a long time.
You could talk about your transparent pricing on the process.
Make sure people aren't afraid of all of this because I think a lot of people really don't like to go to the doctor.
You're viewed as a doctor. It's scary, they might not want to come to appointments, make people feel comfortable.
You could show video walkthrough of your office.
Do you have videos of your staff of the doctor of the experience?
The people get a good cozy, warm, safe feeling when they see your brand online before they ever walk through the door.
Transparency and trust are definitely things I think you could really highlight to help you combat the problems that small direct is causing for themselves and their own brand.
And finally long term health, what we're doing is not just for aesthetics, it's for the long term oral health of your patients.
You can really talk about how important that is and why, what you're doing and supervising the whole process is gonna improve their oral health and make everything a very safe and effective.
And it's gonna be a nice process that you, they can trust you to take them through this journey and everything will be ok at the end because you're the doctor, you're the expert and you care.
I hope that helped you guys think of ways you can take this opportunity and potentially help more people in your community because you know, this is really showing what a brand should not do.
It's gonna be all over the news. There's gonna be people on social media talking about these stories.
So I'm not saying attacking them directly, but we know what the weaknesses are and people are gonna be seeing them more and more as more of these stories come out.
So highlight your strengths to combat the weaknesses of this competitor.
And I think it could help grow your practice.
