For the past 2,500 years or so, since Protagoras and his sophist followers sort to win arguments through technique rather than content, there has been a battle between rhetoric and reason.
Where Socrates used his dialectic rigor to search for the truth, the sophists used skilfully woven and heavily practiced counterpoints purely to win the debate, no matter how specious their claim might be.
Since this time we, the listener, have been left with a need to try and differentiate between sophistry and certainty, working to separate the factual from the fallacious. If the last few years are anything to go by, I’d say the human race is not getting any better at this task.
One of the reasons we humans sometimes find it so hard to spot when we are being misled is our strength of attachment to the concept of causation. Our predilection to view any timeline as a series of cause and effect events is pre-programmed into us. This hardwiring within our brains, combined with our love of a simple narrative means that it is powerfully reassuring for us to believe a well-told story and to favour this version of events over a factually correct explanation that is challenging to follow and even harder to fully understand.
The well-worn mantra:
“everything happens for a reason”
bears testimony to our insatiable need for a “cause-effect explanation” to narrate every event while the more prosaic truth of the phrase is that we simply “attach a reason to everything that happens”.
If we couple the enormous amount of money spent on the art of misleading us with our almost default position of wanting to believe what we are told, so long as it is well told, we can see how tricky it can be to know when we are being misled.
In dentistry, we have gone from a 1997 GDC regulation on “Promoting the Practice” which warned that we should not “make a claim which suggests superiority over any other dentist or practice” and should also not “recommend a specific product” to a world where we can display awards attesting to the fact that we are “The Best Dentist” and can be a social media influencer for our chosen latest favourite gadget. Fakebook and Instascam have convinced many of us that we actually have to do this merely to survive, let alone thrive, in our profession.
We don’t.
But that is not a message that we hear very often.
Around 2005 UK dentists began to experience our first exposure to US sales techniques with the hard-line “Always Be Closing” Glengarry Glen Ross style of selling. I sat one day and listened to a US dental sales coordinator implore a lecture hall of dentists to make sure that the new patient didn’t leave the consult room until they had signed their treatment proposal.
The techniques of marketing change with time but the intention and outcome is always the same: manipulate the consumer to bend to our will. SPIN selling started in the late 80s but appears to be undergoing a revival in some dental marketing spheres. At its core, this technique offers a simple acronym to remind us to identify an individual's needs and then try a provide a solution. There is clearly nothing wrong with this and in the case of our patients, we certainly have a duty to identify their dental problems and offer specific solutions.
As we get paid for this activity it can be said that everything we do in dentistry involves the act of selling. I have no problem with the view that I am a dental health sales rep. What I do sometimes have a problem with though is what aspect we are selling and why.
If we wanted to know whether the enormous growth in dental marketing over the past 25 years has been used primarily to help our patients improve their oral health with low cost interventions to reduce disease activity or to sell the aspirational goal of straight white teeth for all, we wouldn’t have to spend too long on social media to get our answer.
The narrative that by providing all our patients with a beautiful smile we will enhance their mental wellbeing and so improve their general health, personal success, and inner happiness is a compelling one. The fact that this work usually offers our highest profit margins is purely a coincidence.
According to Keyser Soze the greatest trick the devil pulled off was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist. According to propagandists, the greatest trick is to convince a population that they are not being exposed to it. When it comes to marketing the trick is to ensure that:
No one feels they are being misled.
As professionals, it is our job,
to make sure that we are not.
Comments