Power to influence decision-making is moving away from companies, towards the individuals.

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Trends are so important to understand because it helps us predict the future. So what if you had a business in 1990 and you knew that the internet was coming? That would massively change the advantages you would have once the internet came. And we see this even in dentistry. So what happens if you knew how important the internet would be back in let’s say the early 2000s of dentistry then you could prepare a practice that is ready for the internet and reap all the rewards of doing that. So that’s the work that we’re going to

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be engaging with here is taking a look at the trends so that you can use the principles that we’ve covered in other videos in order to predict the future and to create a practice that is ready for and will reap the advantages of what is to come in the future. So I have a couple over here and let’s go over them. So the main shift that we’re going to be talking about today is that the power to influence decision-m is shifting away from corporations, dental offices, the companies themselves and shifting

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towards the people, the individuals, right? The power to influence decision-m. So for the power for me to tell people that hey this is a promotion we’re running, you should come and become a patient. That power itself is diminishing. So let’s go over all the trends here. First is that there is an increase in skepticism of authority. So when we run a promotion that says like 50% off, now we as consumers are very skeptical. Was the price just doubled beforehand and then they attached the 50% off or is it

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really 50% off? I don’t care what you say. Show me your Google reviews. And sometimes you have too many Google reviews and review inflation and distrust is created there. And I don’t care if you have good reviews. What are your bad ones? Where people dig into their bad ones. And ultimately it’ll come down to what their peers are saying. So under the umbrella of power shifting away from companies and corporations towards the individuals, we have the first one which is the distrust of authority. The second

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is that it’s getting costlier and I should mention that that distrust is growing. All right. And the second trend is that it’s getting more costly to reach people who don’t want to hear from us. So we’re 10 times more advertised to than our parents and our parents were 10 times more advertised to than their grandparents. And so effectively we are in our generation about a hundred times more advertised to and distracted than our parents’ generation. So as a defense mechanism, what our brain does is it

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starts filtering everything out. It starts taking the default stance of ignoring things or rejecting them. And so when we engage with these types of people, the default answer is going to be ignoring or rejecting. And compounding with this is the idea that 52% of Americans have some sort of ad blocking. So if you aren’t familiar, there’s browsers like the Brave browser. There is a shift away from Google Chrome going to Firefox with Ublock Origin all of these things to block advertisements

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and so when we engage with advertising we are essentially marketing to only 48% of the eligible population which is a huge hindrance and this percentage of people who are getting on this train of ad blocking software is growing and we you probably yourself have some sort of ad blocking yet you’re maybe okay with being on the other side when it comes to being the advertiser. So we have to change that relationship. We have to not engage with people in that way. There’s currently a war going on

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between advertisers and the individuals. We’re shouting at them and the individuals aren’t listening and they are winning this battle for their attention. The third trend is that awareness platform have taken away our ability to influence. So what I mean by this is if you look back to the principle of attraction. So if you’re trying to attract new patients, the equation there is attraction equals alignment times awareness. So we’ve very much focused on the awareness aspect of of it which is

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visibility which is creating hype creating awareness attention and all this stuff and the platforms that have people’s attention. So platforms like Google where if you are someone who is looking for a dentist your attention is going to be on the Google platform or platforms like Meta which own Facebook and Instagram. So if you are just if you if your mind is going away from work let’s say and then you just want to put your attention somewhere entertaining or even Tik Tok that’s where your attention is going to be. And

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for a long time like SEO used to be a byproduct of this that we used to be able to gify or hack these attention platforms like Google and manipulate the rankings. And what that what what that created was very bad experiences for the users because businesses would be able to manipulate rankings and show up for terms that they had no business showing up for. So, an office in Santa Monica could show up for offices in Orange County. Um, and what that created is essentially a bad experience for users because now they

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were looking for a dentist in Orange County and they were getting results for an office in Santa Monica saying that they were in Orange County and you get the idea. And so what happened was that Yelp was able to take advantage of this by showing only local businesses and doing the filtering themselves, not allowing businesses to manipulate their rankings. And Google is also doing this as well with Google Places. Now they’re taking the reigns away from the companies and saying that hey if you want access to

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the people on our attention you’re going to have to play by our rules and you’re not going to be able to manipulate the results that you you that we give to people because it’s creating a bad experience for people and they’re leaving to other platforms. Right? So the idea of manipulating SEO in order to rank higher for certain search terms is a thing of the past. Um so back to the idea of awareness platforms taking away our ability to influence. So now instead of new um on Google, now instead of SEO,

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the new thing is Google business profiles. And for the most part, you have very little control over the amount of exposure and the amount of ability for you to control how and where you show up. And one thing that people are doing right now are abuse with reviews. They’re incentivizing reviews, going against the policies of Google. And Google is very much it’s in their interest to crack down on this and they are doing it more and more. Um when you look at the cycle of history with Google platforms and in the short

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history that Google’s been here, we’ve seen the cycle of Google being this attention warehouse or story or they they own the attention. People want to get an unfair advantage there. So they find a way to manipulate the system and what Google eventually does is they patch it. They fix the issue there and we see this with Google business profiles. Back then with SEO used to be all these um algorithmic updates and it’s going to be the same for reviews. They’re going to find some way to patch

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it. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but the future trend leads us to understand that if we rely on manipulating the system in order to get an advantage that that advantage will ultimately disappear and we’ll have to start again from scratch. So the platforms like Google and Meta have given us one last option to get an unfair advantage which is to pay to win which is essentially advertising paid advertising which is why I believe and I know that this is the last way for any business to get leverage at

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will. So if they want more exposure at will, if they want to boost up their numbers at will, then it’s going to have to be advertising because all the other methods are throttled. That if you try to get a lot of reviews in order to increase exposure, you won’t there. There you you can have a lot of reviews, but it’s not going to increase the amount of exposure that Google shows you to. Although it’s going to help in your local area, so you definitely should be doing it, but um it’s not something that

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you should be relying on as a competitive advantage, especially as other offices catch on and realize that it’s very easy to incentivize reviews as well. All right, so let’s talk about advertising. Um it’s worked for a while, but now we’re paying to advertise to people who are distrustful and don’t want to see ads. And if you know anything about ads, the ability to track data is crucial. like tracking how people engage with your advertisements lets you in improve the advertisements

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so that you get better results with it. Back in the day, you used to be able to run ads and it would perform well. But nowadays, what you have to do is you have to iterate. You have to make guesses on what would work well. And most of the times it’s not going to work as well as we thought it would. And so we have to go back to the drawing board, look at the data, and say, “Okay, this is what went well. This is what didn’t go well. Let’s improve the stuff that didn’t go well.” And that’s how we make

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iterative improvements in order to find advertisements that work very well. But the problem is tracking. Our ability to look at that data is being um we’re not getting access to that anymore because of privacy. Um privacy concerns, people demanding more privacy, regulations from the government, regulations from health, uh HIPPA, especially in healthcare, it’s growing tremendously. Um la like I think a couple days ago I just got a new email saying that hey we’re rolling out these sweeping privacy

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changes it’s going to be more restrictive etc and etc. So our ability to get better ads is becoming slower and it’s going to take more time. It’s going to be more costly. So ultimately advertising is also getting more ineffective. All right the fourth trend. So there are more people playing the awareness game than ever. I think what happened was that in the age of SEO which was a little bit before 2015 um the second rate practices the ones that weren’t doing a good job that the ones that weren’t excellent were

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figuring out that they could get an unfair advantage by playing the game of SEO paying a company and getting them to rank higher on Google. And so what happened was that as an industry I think we all started to focus and fixate on awareness. Recall back to alignment times awareness in this equation of attraction. We started to focus exclusively on awareness. And as more and more people realize that advertising now is the last option combined with this industry focus on awareness, we’ve shifted significantly

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to focusing on advertising now and um this year in 2026 the number of practices that are expected to advertise is expected to increase by 25%. which I think shows how like one in four offices now are going to be advertising the ones that didn’t before which shows a significant increase in the number of offices advertising and the people who are realizing that advertising is the last um road for them to get patients because they’re not working on alignment and so now what happens when more people

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start advertising well profit margins get erased because if I was advertising vering to hopefully gain $1,000. A competitor could say, “You know what? I’m going to be willing to pay $900.” And then I might say, “I’m willing to pay $950 for that.” And they might say, “You know what? I’m willing to pay $999.” So in any auction system which Google and Meta are the person who wins the auction, the person who ends up making that transaction is the person who is willing

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to lose the most. That is what defines an auction winner. The person who is willing to lose the most. And so the game of an auction is something that we need to start distancing ourselves from. And one approach, one way to win the game of auctions, to be able to pay more, to be able to lose more and still win a game of auction is if you increase the lifetime value of each patient. But to increase the lifetime value of each patient consciously and intentionally is a very slippery slope that I think we’re better off not

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touching either. So let’s talk about the good trends. So, those were four um kind of bleak trends and let me go over them again real quick. The first is that there’s an increase in skepticism of authority. The second is that it’s costlier than ever to reach people who don’t want to hear us. The third is that awareness platforms have taken away our ability to influence. And fourth, there are more people playing the awareness or advertising game than ever. And again, these trends are just increasing and

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growing worse. So the good trends, the first or at least the fifth trend is that individuals are empowered to choose. So they’re choosing demanding or so they’re choosing and demanding more niche things. Online stores don’t have a shelf space limitation. So if you think about the past, if you walk into a CVS or a Walmart or a Target or wherever, the only options there are going to be the things that support a large enough volume of people to make the ends meet. So these stores are only going to have

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in stock mostly very non-niche items, items that many people would want. Of course, you have niche stores which come with a premium, but that’s a different conversation. All right. What we have is more variety of options. Now, Amazon doesn’t have to get rid of low sellers. They can list stuff and have it there perpetually without having to worry about shelf space or optimizing um return on shelf space. So, people can find more niche items. And combine that with the internet, with Google, with our

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ability to find more niche stuff and now as that trend increases, our like AI search, our ability to find really obscure things and have other people crawl the internet for us or other AI agents crawl the internet for us. What we get is that now we can connect with more niche interests. we can search for, find niche interests and we can um communicate and create communities with niche interests. So, we get more groups for weird people, which is fantastic because those weird people love those weird things. And so, we have an

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increase in a desire uh for niche things, for things that aren’t mass, for things that are more meaningful. And also, we have cars and planes. One thing that always kind of stuck out to me in the marketing industry with dentistry is that we always focus on a 5 to 10 mile radius. Particularly in cities, it was like a 3 to 5 mile radius. And I think we forgot that people have cars and planes that if we find something that’s very niche and very meaningful that we can’t find anywhere else that we’re willing to

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drive 30 minutes to go somewhere, that we’re willing to fly on a plane. And I know some dentists who are right now going on a trip to Florida from California to take a seminar for dentistry because it’s something that is worthwhile for them. And why don’t we do the work of creating this type of meaning for patients? Like are our patients ability to travel limited or are we setting up ourselves to fail by aligning with a certain type of patient which are which are those who don’t care enough about dentistry to to

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travel more than 10 minutes. Are we trying to be a little bit more convenient? And what could be meaningful to a 30 minute or what if you could be meaningful enough so that it justifies a 30 minute drive which is about a 10 20 mile radius which is not that much. So our ability to reach uh to to to like distance is becoming less of an issue is what I’m trying to say with that. that we have more niche wants, more niche demands. We want more meaning rather than the status quo and average and we

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have the means of getting that word of mouth is exponentially amplified. And this is why my course is titled the um or word of mouth marketing is because this one trend is has been the definition has defined the recent years. We live in a more connected world than ever before. Our ability to send information to people who want to hear from us is cheaper than ever. Think of how much it might cost back then to send a message by horse or by I don’t know pigeon, right? And then we forward that to today or even like mail that goes

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through the train uh train systems and now we have email where things are sent immediately and it’s virtually free. You can create a free Gmail account, anyone can, and send messages to anyone immediately. Contrast that with that, it’s getting costlier than ever to talk to people who don’t want to hear from us, yet it’s cheaper than ever to talk to people who want to hear from us. And as this happens, the question becomes, isn’t where do it? The question is no longer where do we

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rank on Google, but it’s are people specifically searching for us because someone told them about them? Because if we’re moving away from if we’re not able to influence the system anymore, if we’re not able to influence these attention platforms and word of mouth is amplified to a degree we’ve never seen before, the question is, are we getting the benefits of word of mouth? Because if not, then we’re doing something very wrong. Information flows laterally now from person to person, not from organization

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to person. So it’s no longer the organization speaking to many people. It’s too costly. An organization trying to advertise to everyone. It’s too costly. What happens now is that the organization connects with individuals at an individual level and those individuals spread information laterally. That’s how word of mouth happens. All right. So the conclusion of all this is that we can see from the trends that we’re heading to a future where the means for organizations to influence the

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the means for organizations to influence the decisions of people are being throttled and individuals now hold the megaphone. Advertising our last method is getting less effective, more costly and it’s being shown to less people who are more distrustful. The flow of information will be horizontal, influenced by individuals who are demanding, less generic and more meaningful of everything. Those who focus on alignment, alignment times awareness equals attraction. Those who focus on alignment rather than

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awareness will be the ones who benefit from the future because awareness is solved. Awareness is word of mouth. Now if you are creating strong alignment the word will get out there that if you are meaningful to a small group of people that they will tell the others about you and therefore people will find you. And let’s go back to the idea of the niche market that I was talking about. Unlike CVS, unlike Target, unlike Walmart, if you’re a niche snake breeder and you carry species of snakes that are sought

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after by snake hobbyists that aren’t being able to be found anywhere else, snake hobbyists will tell each other about your store. That awareness now because of the internet, because of our ability to search, to transmit information is solved. If people want to search for you, if people want to look for you, which is why I talked about it’s it’s not about where you stand on the Google ranks. It’s are people searching for you specifically because that means you have word of mouth on

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your side, which is going to be the main thing, not Google rankings. We even see Google itself deprioritizing rankings, pushing it all the way down, having about 10% of the traffic only look at Google rankings. All right. So, that’s my spiel today. Trends are how we predict the future. There’s a lot of bad trends, bleak trends that tell us where we should move away from. A lot of very empowering and strong trends that give us an idea of where we should head towards. And as a result, the conclusion is that

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we have to focus on alignment, on creating deeper meaning with people so that we can take advantage of the trends. Because if we don’t do that, then we’re going to be stuck relying on these bleak trends and we’re not going to be able to take advantage of the empowering ones. All right, if you want to create that for your own demo practice, I’ll have my free course in the description below. Check it out. I’ll see you guys in the next one. Thanks.