Connecting the dots

Women are wired for connection. Connecting your female clients with each other connects them to your hospital and creates huge brand loyalty. Bring them together for enjoyable, meaningful experiences:

• Classes in dog massage

• Presentations on alternative pet medical care

• Set up a dog walking club

• Meet to set up a strategy to help the city create off-leash dog friendly parks

• Hold pet behavior classes

• Help them connect with each other to trade dog sitting when traveling

I am sure you can think of other ways to help women connect. If it involves public service or volunteering, all the better. Giving back to the community ranks very high with your female clients. Women with their "we" attitude really do care whether or not companies behave like good citizens. Take up a good cause and women will beat a path to the practice door.

Time is more than money

Want to win the hearts of your female clients? Save them time. Women live a different lifestyle than men do. In addition to jobs and careers, working mothers spend twice as much time on childcare and household chores as men. Women are time-starved. Women don't have time to spare. She doesn't have time to wait another ten minutes in your hospital past her scheduled appointment. Hospitals must be aware of how frustrating this waste of her time can be.

If you want to be her friend:

•  Keep your scheduled appointments on time

•  Provide a chile space so she doesn't have to hire a baby sitter to keep the appointment

•  Provide evening and weekend hours so she can make appointments based on her schedule

To her time is more than money. Time spent with your practice means less time for her to spend with her family, at the gym or getting her other chores done. In fact, she will spend money to save time. You can help.

The importance of hospital design

During the last twenty years, the architecture and interior design of veterinary hospitals took a great leap forward. Just look at the featured design awards in Veterinary Economics. Unfortunately, the likes and dislikes of the owner(s) most often held sway with the architects. Architects and designers want to please their clients.

The emphasis should instead be placed on the client. What kind of space would the client like? That is the important question. It is she who holds the key to our success. Hospitals should be designed with women in mind. Women's brains perceive a finer level of detail than men's brains and women have a longer list of wants than men. One way to grab them is to excel at the nuance of design.

This can begin by admitting that you, as a doctor or technician, do not excel at the nuance of design. Let a good architect and interior designer show you the way.

In all senses except sight, women have greater sensitivity than men. Your hospital environment has a big impact on them. If it's a little dirty, if it's a little disorganized, it it doesn't smell quite right, women are going to be dismayed. A great way to attract women who are your prime marketing target is to appeal to their senses and satisfy their wants (a place to park the kids, a clean walkway where they can walk the dog in their high heels before entering the hospital, a hook to tie the leash while they write a check, a computer for checking their email while they wait, etc.)

Do you get it?

Financial services companies don't get it.

Health services companies don't get it.

Hospitality services companies don't get it.

Computer companies don't get it.

Automobile companies don't get it.

Veterinary hospitals don't get it.

None of them get it!

Women as purchasers are responsible for more than half of all spending in the U.S. economy.

Home furnishings: 94%

Vacations: 89%

Kitchen appliances: 88%

New Homes: 75% 

Healthcare: 80%

Veterinary Care: 85%

You don't have to be a brain surgeon to get the picture. If you want to be successful as a small business, learn to market to her and develop a client service attitude that is female-centric.

When Jiffy Lube started to get it, they hired Faith Popcorn, the leading consultant for female marketing. Popcorn's advice sounded a lot like what I have been preaching to my veterinary clients for the last fifteen years: "Escort her out of her car, put her in a clean waiting room, let her have access to email if she wants, let her read some magazines–current ones, please!–and give her a clean bathroom with the seat down and a changing table. Add some low-fat snacks, and you've got her for life."

This is not rocket science. It's not nuclear physics. It's common sense. Follow the facts. Follow the money. Remember that your client is a woman and treat her the way a woman wants to be treated.

The Meaning of Life is...

What are your clients interested in? According to Faith Popcorn in her best-selling book, The Popcorn Report, she is interested in the search "not only for a better life, but for a better, happier, longer life. That somehow, somewhere, somebody has the answer to disease prevention, age prevention, the prevention of death itself..." 

For her own body, your client has developed a keen interest in exercise (pilates, yoga, tai chi etc), nutrition (look at the growth in organic foods which used to be "fringe" and now can be found in every store), alternative medical modalities (reflexology, homeopathy, acupressure and acupuncture etc).

Faith writes: "More and more, we see the very meaning of life as improving the quality of life itself–and life, of course, begins with our own bodies" and, by extension, the bodies of her pets.

The lesson is clear. If you want to be meaningful to your client, consider offering the following types of programs at your practice:

•  Pet exercise programs

•  Alternative medical care like homeopathy and acupuncture

•  Class in pet massage and acupressure

•  Behavior classes

•  Kennels that massage the pet's senses

When you, the doctor, think quality, you think of continuing ed and better tools. When your client thinks quality, it is more about the above. Remember that you are marketing to her and she is the one you are serving. Making her happy is the key to a level of success that will support the best veterinary medicine and equipment. If your programs have meaning for her, she will rush to your door.

Reach out and touch someone

The whole purpose of marketing to reach out and touch someone and to have that person remember you when it's time to choose a veterinarian. The instinct of most veterinarians is to use their marketing to explain why they would be such a good choice: we believe in quality medicine, your pet is a member of our family, we are friendly etc.

Marketing research is clear. We remember emotionally charged events better than boring ones. It is the emotions aroused, not the significance of the event, that makes them easier to remember. You are less likely to remember information than the emotion.

If you want to create a long term memory in your prospective client's brain, you need to reach out and touch her emotions. Here are the key points to keep in mind:

• Emotionally charged events are better remembered.

• Pleasant emotions are remembered better than unpleasant ones.

• Positive memories contain more informational details (like your hospital name)

• It's the emotional arousal, not the importance of the information, that helps memory.

How do you reach out and touch her feelings? There are many ways. Here is one.

Women's brains are hard wired to respond in a motherly way to babies–human babies, puppies, kittens, koalas etc. The very sight of a baby can cause her brain to produce oxytocin, a neurotransmitter that creates a rush of good feeling. Using a photo of a baby human or pet is a good way to reach out and touch someone with your marketing.

Brain Velcro

VELCRO FOR THE BRAIN

The purpose of marketing is to be a home in a prospective client's mind. If the client cannot remember you, it is difficult to choose you.

When you enter the prospect's brain with a marketing message, it is not likely to stay there. Short term memory goes  first. When new information enters the brain, the brain wants to make sense out of it. The brain does a scan of preexisting data in the brain, looking for a match. If it finds a match, your marketing message stands a better chance of locking into long term memory and you will have succeeded in building the home in the brain or in buying some "mind share."

You can think of this as placing velcro hooks in your marketing message that can latch onto existing velcro loops in her long term memory. This is why advertisers use or make a pun out of existing familiar phrases: e.g. "An apple a day keeps the..." Your brain completes the phrase because virtually the aphorism lives in your long term memory.

As you build marketing messages, try to hook onto memories and experiences that you know exist in the prospect's brain.