Summary of Blue Ocean Strategy for Dental Practices
This video explores the application of the Blue Ocean Strategy within dental practices to differentiate from competitors and avoid commoditization. With rapid technological advances, globalization, and stricter regulatory standards such as those from the FDA, dental practices increasingly appear similar to patients. This similarity drives competition primarily on convenience or price, leading to a “race to the bottom.”
Blue Ocean Strategy offers a framework to redesign how dental practices deliver value, enabling them to attract new patients—especially those who are currently non-customers of dentistry—and increase profitability without competing on price alone. The strategy involves creating a unique value curve that visibly differentiates the practice from competitors.
Six Paths to Create a Blue Ocean Strategy in Dentistry
The core of the video is a step-by-step guide consisting of six strategic paths to redesign value delivery:
| Step | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Look across alternative industries to understand what solutions people use instead of dentistry and why. |
| 2 | Look across strategic groups within the dental industry such as corporate dentistry, private practices, or DIY kits. |
| 3 | Look across the chain of buyers: purchasers, users, and influencers, to identify overlooked buyers and their needs. |
| 4 | Look across complementary products and services to incorporate value before, during, and after dental treatments. |
| 5 | Look across functional vs. emotional appeal to balance rational and emotional value propositions to patients. |
| 6 | Look across time to identify irreversible trends with clear trajectories that decisively impact the dental business. |
Detailed Insights on Each Path
- Alternative Industries:
Identify what alternatives patients use to solve dental problems (e.g., home remedies, cosmetic treatments) and combine the best elements of those with dental care. Importantly, use the strategy of eliminating or reducing costly or low-value aspects while raising or creating new value elements unseen in dentistry. - Strategic Groups Within Dentistry:
Different groups serve different patient segments. For example, corporate DSOs focus on volume and efficiency, while niche high-fee practices emphasize personalized care. Understanding why patients choose one over another helps design a hybrid or novel value offering. - Chain of Buyers:
Recognize that decision-making involves multiple roles:- Purchasers: e.g., parents buying orthodontics for children
- Users: the patients receiving treatment
- Influencers: e.g., employers or insurance providers directing patient choice
Designing services that appeal to all or overlooked segments in this chain can create unique value.
- Complementary Products and Services:
Consider ancillary needs surrounding dental care such as anxiety management, pain relief, or pre-treatment education. Integrating these into service offerings can vastly improve patient experience and satisfaction. - Functional vs. Emotional Appeal:
Patients make decisions based on both:- Functional factors: pain reduction, improved oral function, predictable outcomes
- Emotional factors: comfort, trust, reduced anxiety
Practices focused on one end of this spectrum can increase value by incorporating elements from the other, sometimes requiring trade-offs between complexity and efficiency.
- Looking Across Time:
Identify trends that are:- Decisive to the dental business
- Irreversible (not cyclical or faddish)
- Having a clear trajectory (directionally predictable)
Leveraging such trends allows a practice to “ride the wave” of market change, creating unprecedented value aligned with evolving patient expectations.
Key Takeaways and Conclusions
- Blue Ocean Strategy enables dental practices to escape commoditization by redefining their value proposition beyond price and convenience.
- The six paths provide a structured approach to uncover overlooked opportunities for differentiation.
- Incorporating insights from alternative industries, buyer roles, emotional and functional needs, and long-term trends leads to a practice that is distinctive, remarkable, and capable of commanding higher fees.
- The strategy emphasizes simultaneously reducing costs and increasing value by eliminating less valuable features while innovating with new offerings.
- Ultimately, this approach unlocks new market space—including non-customers—and strengthens patient loyalty.
This framework, when thoughtfully applied, can transform a dental practice into a unique, highly valued service provider in a crowded marketplace.
Keywords
- Blue Ocean Strategy
- Value Curve
- Commoditization
- Chain of Buyers (Purchasers, Users, Influencers)
- Functional vs. Emotional Appeal
- Complementary Products and Services
- Irreversible Trends
- Dental Practice Differentiation
- Patient Experience
- Market Space Creation
00:00:00
So in yesterday’s video, we took a look at the importance of creating a blue ocean strategy for your own practice. How with the advent of technological advances, globalization, and all these other factors, commoditization has accelerated. The speed at which businesses become commodities is accelerated because it’s easier than ever for other organizations to follow the leader, to leverage technology to improve their quality. FDA standards and regulatory bodies are increasing the standards we’re held to. And so when
00:00:33
patients look at dental practices from the outside, everyone sort of looks the same. And when you look the same as your competitors, the only way you can really stand out is to be more convenient or to lower your prices, which is a race to the bottom. So the blue ocean strategy is the process of redesigning how you show up and the value that you seek to give to the patients you seek to serve in order to not only attract them but also increase your profits and also unlock non-C customers meaning people
00:01:05
who aren’t patients of dentistry who aren’t seeking out dentistry because of some reason and unlocking those people. And we also took a look at the idea of the strategy uh canvas which is what do the f what are the factors that the dentist that dentistry as an industry is focused on? What do private practice owners focus on? What do more corporate DSOs f focus on as far as the factors of what people find valuable? So this could be things like weight times. This could be things like the the personability of
00:01:39
the doctor themselves and all these different factors. What is the makeup of that? And now let’s take a look at how to create your own strategy canvas to create your own value skew so that when patients see your services from the outside, it is visibly different and the value that you’re able to give is unlike any other practice out there. such that now you are no longer stuck in that commodity of competing with other practices of people nickel and dimming you because someone else does it for
00:02:12
cheaper. Let’s get into the process and there’s six steps here. So six paths to figuring out better ways for your organization to show up and let’s get into these. So as a quick summary, it’s going to be to look across alternative industries, look across strategic um strategic groups within your industry, to look across the chain of buyers, to look across complimentary products and service offerings, to look across functional or emotional appeal to buyers, and finally the sixth one is to
00:02:44
look across time. So let’s get into each of those. So first one is to look across alternative industry. So when we think of dentistry, what function, what is it seeking to solve? Why do people choose dentistry? And then what are the alternatives to dentistry? What other stuff are people looking at as a way to alleviate the problems they seek to fix with dentistry? And when we can look across these alternatives, we can see why would they choose the alternative versus choose dental uh dentistry. And
00:03:17
when we can see the other value on the other side of the equation, we’re able to do the work of figuring out how can we create the best of both worlds such that not only do they get the benefit of dentistry and all the good stuff about it, but we can also offer the good stuff about the alternatives. And so the approach that most organizations take is to just dump as much value as they can. But the problem with that approach is that it gets too costly for the organization to sustain. So the one of
00:03:50
the principles of the blue ocean strategy is we must always be looking to see what can we eliminate, what can we reduce um in terms of cost and things that are only giving incremental value or no value at all to your patients. And on the flip side, what are the things that we can raise and things we can create that the dental industry doesn’t does that maybe the alternatives do that has a lot of value for the patients? Things people want to see that dentistry as an industry isn’t providing yet. All
00:04:20
right. So looking across other industries and alternatives um for what kind of how you can show up better and how you can give more value is very important. The second one is to look across strategic groups within industry uh within industries. So it’s similar to the idea of looking across other industries but now we’re just looking at within dental. Why do some people choose corporate dentistry? Why do some people choose um very niche high fee dentist? Why do people pick within the dental industry maybe do-it-yourself
00:04:51
kits? Right? and looking within these strategic groups, these groups that are seeking to serve patients by choosing corporate, by choosing um do-it-yourself, by choosing private practice, right? Why do people choose one or the other? And again, what is the value uh proposition of each and how can we incorporate that better while also removing the things that people don’t like about our current way of doing stuff? All right, number three is to look across the chain of buyers. So when we think of people who get dentistry,
00:05:28
who receive dental treatments, we’re typically thinking of the user, right? So there are three chain uh three elements of the chain of buyers, which are the purchasers, the users, and the influencers. So purchasers could be things like the parent who purchases dentistry for like orthodontics for their kids. And in that example, the user would be the kid as well. Um, or in maybe adult dentistry, the purchaser and user might be the same person. Uh, influencers are people who are influencing the decision of where people
00:06:02
make that purchasing decision. So, it could be things like employers who are getting their um team members into an insurance plan and hooking them up with a dentist. Right? So these are the three elements of the chain of buyers within dentistry that we need to take a look at and of course there’s more uh out there. There’s three elements but the examples I gave there’s more than that. So can you redesign your value curve to focus on an overlooked set of buyers? Like I mentioned we typically focus on the
00:06:30
user. Can we diff or or some savvy orthodontists focus on the purchaser but can we differentiate each element and figure out why are they buying? Why is that employer choosing this dental office over another? Why is this parent choosing this one over another? Why does this kid want this dentist over another? And can we integrate the elements that bring the value to those chains of buyers? If we’re only seeking right now, if we’re only serving, let’s say, the purchaser and the user, how can we
00:06:59
change our strategy canvas such that we um serve more influencers? All right. Step four, look across complimentary products and service offerings. So the question here is what other products or services do people use during, before or before, during, and after receiving dental treatments from you or receiving your service? And how can you incorporate those into your service? How can you eliminate the things that they want to eliminate by purchasing something else? How can you add the value of the value they seek to get by
00:07:35
purchasing something else? So wild example, let’s say before they reach out for a dentist, they’re searching and during the dental treatment, they are anxious and after they are in pain. Let’s just say a very um simple example or a wild example because maybe let’s say before they search for a dentist, maybe you can provide a catalog of different options, different price points and um what they specialize in or what they’re very good at and have a menu that you offer your patients,
00:08:08
right? And maybe during you can incorporate ways to deal with anxiety and maybe afterwards you can work some way to deal with the pain. And so by doing so, you’re able to get all the value like the things that are pe that the things that people are purchasing or engaging with before, during or after um service with you, they’re doing it because they see the value of it. So if you’re able to incorporate those elements into your service as well, then you’re going to find massive you’re
00:08:39
going to be able to deliver more massive value to your patients. All right. Um, fifth one, look across functional or emotional appeal to buyers. So, if you’re in well, if you’re showing up in a way where you’re appealing to the function of people who work with you, of your patients, if you commonly talk about how it’s going to reduce pain, improve function, um, all this functional elements, then it’s going to benefit you to look at the other end of the spectrum where it’s more emotional.
00:09:11
So, we make purchasing decisions. sometimes based on rationality and function and sometimes and mostly based on emotional. So if you’re focused on function, what are the emotional things that you can add to your practice in order to increase value? If you’re purely or if you’re mostly focused on emotional stuff, what are the functional elements that you can add in order to increase the value that you provide to customers? Um, so for if you’ve been focused on functional appeal, see if you can
00:09:40
incorporate emotional appeal. And if you’re going from emotional to functional, what can you strip away? Like if you’re going from emotional and you’re doing all these things to help people emotionally and you want to increase the value you can provide functionally, you’re going to have to take away stuff in order to create more efficiency, streamline the process, create more predictable outcomes. For functional to emotional, what can you add? What are things that aren’t being
00:10:03
done? maybe by alternatives, maybe by um different segments that you aren’t doing that you can also start to provide. All right. Finally, the sixth path is to look at uh look across time. So there’s three principles of assessing trends across time. The first is decisive to business. The second is irreversible and the third is having a clear trajectory. So we have to look across or we have to identify trends that fit all three criteria or else we can just be looking at a trend that is re reversible. So
00:10:34
let’s say like fashion um it’s always cycling back and forth between what is trending and so we can’t really build a strategy on top of that. So we’re looking for these three principles of decisive to the business meaning it must be relative to you. I don’t really care what the trend of Bitcoin might be for dentistry let’s say. um irreversible meaning it’s clear that this trend is going one direction and it’s not going to later on change or shift gears and it has a clear trajectory meaning we know
00:11:04
that it’s going up or we know that it’s going down and when you look across these trends you can ask yourself how can you create unprecedented value based on how the world is changing and this is a very powerful one as well because now you unlock the wave the flow of the market and you’re able to build on top of that. All right, so that’s blue ocean strategy in a nutshell on how to create or how to identify different ways that you can unlock more value for your patients and by doing so you’re able to
00:11:36
become more remarkable to them. You’re able to attract them. You’re able to charge a higher fee because the level of value that you provide is unlike any other practice out there and you provide the most of it. All right, hope you found this video helpful and I’ll see you guys in the next