‘In spite of the fact that we had an appointment, we were kept waiting for 45 minutes. Then Dr. Arif Alvi sauntered in, stayed for less than 5 minutes with us and then was gone just like that.  During that brief five minutes, he refused to answer most of the questions, questions that are typical and a patient would expect to ask, especially from such a renowned specialist’.

‘I asked him about the gap between my teeth which was the purpose of my visit while my colleague was there for the scaling. Instead of focusing on that, he after a brief examination instructed both of us to get an X-ray to confirm whether we needed a scaling process. I again asked him about the gap, which he refused to answer. He said that would be explained afterwards.’

‘And then he was gone. The whole process took less than five minutes.’

‘We went for the X-ray which took about 20-25 minutes, came back to the doctor’s room and were again kept waiting for another 30 minutes before the esteemed doctor ambled into the room to announce his verdict.’

‘Our appointment was at 3.00 pm. We finally departed at 5.30 pm in spite of the fact that there were only a handful of patients.’

‘The bill – Rs.1,000 for the doctor’s precious minutes, and another Rs.1,000 for the X-Ray’.

‘I was expecting better treatment than this’, concluded the disillusioned executive.

What does this story tell us? The renowned doctor is too busy to give much time to each individual patient. In fact he doesn’t even have the time to perform many of the procedures on his patients.

Is that a bad thing? On the face of it, no. The same complaints have been heard from patients desirous of getting treated by Dr. Shah of the A.O Clinic fame. In fact, the more famous a doctor or any professional in the service industry gets, he’s going to face the same problem. You hire and train people as best as possible to reflect the same service as imparted by you.

Blink

Here’s a bit of a revelation from Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, rated as one of the Top 10 Marketing Books of all time by AdAge:

‘Believe it or not, the risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes. Analyses of malpractice lawsuits show that there are highly skilled doctors who get sued a lot and doctors who make lots of mistakes and never get sued. At the same time, the overwhelming number of people who suffer an injury due to negligence of a doctor never file a malpractice suit at all. In other words, patients don’t file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care. Patients file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care and something else happens to them.

What is that something else? It’s how they were treated, on a personal level, by their doctor. What comes up again and again in malpractice cases is that patients say they were rushed or ignored or treated poorly. ‘People just don’t sue doctors they like,” is how Alice Burkin, a leading medical malpractice lawyer, puts it. “In all the years I’ve been in this business, I’ve never had a potential client walk in and say, ‘I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him.’ We’ve had people come in saying they want to sue some specialist, and we’ll say, ‘We don’t think that doctor was negligent. We think it’s your primary care doctor who was at fault.’ And the client will say, ‘I don’t care what she did. I love her, and I’m not suing her.’

Burkin once had a client who had a breast tumor that wasn’t spotted until it had metastasized, and she wanted to sue her internist for the delayed diagnosis. In fact, it was her radiologist who was potentially at fault. But the client was adamant. She wanted to sue the internist. “In our first meeting, she told me she hated this doctor because she never took the time to talk to her and never asked about her other symptoms,” Burkin said. “ ‘She never looked at me as a whole person,’ the patient told us…. When a patient has a bad medical result, the doctor has to take the time to explain what happened, and to answer the patient’s questions – to treat him like a human being. The doctors who don’t are the ones who get sued.”

Recently the medical researcher Wendy Levinson recorded hundreds of conversations between a group of physicians and their patients. Roughly half of the doctors had never been sued. The other half had been sued at least twice, and Levinson found that just on the basis of those conversations, she could find clear differences between the two groups. The surgeons who had never been sued spent more than three minutes longer with each patient than those who had been sued did (18.3 minutes versus 15 minutes).’

Now this tells us that the day lawsuits become the trend in this part of the world, the service industry professionals here, especially the doctors are going to have a huge dent in their bank account.

So what could Dr. Arif Alvi have done to make the experience better for these two patients? One option is that he could have avoided seeing these two people altogether, the premise being, if he didn’t interact with them, they wouldn’t have a story to tell about him now, isn’t it?

The other option is, he ought to have given more time to them, answering their queries as best as possible. This simple gesture would have made all the difference in the world.

In this case, the difference would have been that these two people would have gone ahead and got the scaling done at Alvi Dental Hospital in spite of the fact that the rates charged- Rs. 5,000(scaling)+Rs.1,000 (consultant fees)Rs. 1,000(X-ray)= Rs.7,000 is way above the market rate of Rs.2,000-3,000. Consumers usually ignore the premium pricing if they perceive the service they are getting to be up to the mark.

It’s really as simple as that. And this applies to not only these two patients but any patient who spends his time and money to visit the learned doctor.

But would the testimonial of these two customers snowball into a terribly negative publicity hurting the business? Very unlikely. Competent people in our part of the world are rarely affected adversely if they are not good at people skills. Their counterparts in the Western World are not so fortunate.

Although the chances of such a thing happening are pretty slim, it does show you that you don’t need the thrills and frills of branding to differentiate your offering. All you need to do is stay competent just enough and overly nice. The being nice part is going to be the differentiating factor since this is the one thing seriously lacking in our service industry. Stick to just these two basics, and over a period of time, you would have carved out a niche brand for yourself backed by word-of-mouth. Remember you don’t need to be the best in your field or the president of your industry’s association to attain this position.

So if at any point in time Dr. Arif Alvi finds his customer base shrinking, all he needs to do is turn on a disarming smile, spend more than his quota of five minutes actively listening to his patients and answering their queries, and the rest will be taken care of by a positive word-of-mouth by the charmed patients who may just happen to become his lifelong customers, thereby increasing the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).

But does Dr. Alvi encompass the entire brand equity of Alvi Dental Hospital? While that’s not possible, but he being a renowned specialist does provide the crux of the brand power to this hospital. Even these two disgruntled patients were motivated to visit the hospital because of him as opposed to any brand distinction of the hospital itself. So yes, he does personify the brand essence of the hospital to a large degree and anything he does or doesn’t do has a large bearing on the brand image.

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It was one of those outrageously simple contests where you had to name the debut album of Cold Play. Of course in these type of contests almost everyone answers correctly so it essentially becomes a draw where you randomly pick out a winner. The prize in this case was a pair of tickets for the upcoming Cold Play concert in Abu Dhabi,UAE.

Anyway, that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was, one; the contest was sponsored by Indus Motors, the makers of Toyota Corolla in Pakistan; two, the winner was a university student. How did I know he was a university student? From his statement after winning the contest that he got the winning call while he was taking a marketing class. Unless things have dramatically changed in our education system since I was in it, a marketing course isn’t taught in a college or school in Pakistan.

Here it is worth noting that CityFM89 did well to broadcast his reaction after winning the prize. I know it’s standard marketing gimmick, but it still needs to be done. CityFM89 also deserves credit for airing the winner name and his reaction to winning it frequently throughout the day. This sort of thing resonates well with the consumer.

So why were these two points interesting? Because Indus Motors sponsored a contest for their brand Corolla whose winner was invariably going to be a young fella, hardly target market material for a brand whose cheapest model XLi costs well above the million rupees mark!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m always for creating memorable experiences for a select few instead of churning out millions for ATL activities, because that’s how you create brand evangelists who’re going to root for your brand in sickness and in health till death do them apart i.e. the brand and its evangelist. Having as many evangelists as possible although a costly business, ensures that the brand will have consumers with high CLVs (Customer Lifetime Value), as well as a word-of-mouth advertising for life. And without these evangelists, a brand has little chance of attaining the brand pinnacle.

There’s also no denying the fact that this winner is going to have a tremendous time at the concert and he’s going to subconsciously associate this experience with Toyota. But then what? Is he going to buy a Corolla after coming back from the concert? Hardly.  Maybe ten years down the line when he can afford one.

In consumer behavior course, one of the basic things you’re taught is that there are two classes of people in love with your brand – one who want to but can’t afford it, second, those who can and who will.

Toyota did well to sponsor something on CityFM89 because this is the channel that caters to the A class, the class with the motivation and the wallet to go for a Corolla, but they chose the wrong tactic. The brand manager of Corolla ought to know that the target audience of ColdPlay is predominantly the youth. There may be SFIs (six-figure income) as well who like ColdPlay and can easily afford a Toyota Corolla, but then they’re hardly going to call in such a contest, now will they? There’s a possibility they may have, but we don’t know that, and it seems highly unlikely, especially when you look at the winner.

So Indus Motor’s strategy was absolutely right, create brand evangelists by immersing them in ‘out-of-this-world’ experience, but the tactic wasn’t. Unless Corolla brand manager is looking at the long-term, creating brand evangelists who’re going to serve the brand after ten years. But that line of thinking, although much needed, hardly exists in the Pakistani branding fraternity. 

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