Your intuition is right. Dental marketing has lost its purpose.

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Hey, happy new year. Welcome to 2026. So, marketing, as you might have noticed, has profoundly changed. But our understanding of what to do about that, our understanding of how we engage in this new dynamic of prospective patient, customer to you as a business, as a practice, that understanding hasn’t changed that hasn’t changed at all. And so, we engage in the same behaviors. We engage in the same activities. And it’s like bashing a head against the wall. It doesn’t get the results that we’re looking for. And

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I want to bring this up now because as an industry, as a dental industry, we’ve fixated so much. Our perspective, our belief on what marketing is is so narrow to the point that we can’t do the important work of the other stuff. The other stuff that marketing is. When we see marketing as just building visibility, building awareness, building traffic, we can’t do the work of building an experience, making things more meaningful to people, creating a system that naturally begets referrals.

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Because when we see marketing in this narrow lens, it’s tempting to outsource it. It’s tempting to just hire an agency. It’s tempting to get a third party freelancer or so to come in do that work or even assign an employee like this work of visibility and we can’t do the important work. It the important work gets neglected. We think we’re taking care of it but it’s not. All right. So my challenge to you and what we’ll go over today in this video is to expand your expand your idea of

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what marketing can be of the different things it can affect. And what you’ll notice is that it’s going to require more of you the owner. There’s going to be a lot of decisions to be made that an agency can’t make for you. They can’t come in and tell you you need to do this type of treatment. You need to serve this type of person. You need to create these type of things. you need to price at this point. They can’t do that, right? That’s all going to be up to you. And even if they did, what

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kind of life would that be? How much meaning would that have for you? Or would that be an inauthentic practice? All right, so let’s get into the ideas of what better marketing looks like. What is marketing that is more resilient? What is marketing that has feedback loops? What is marketing that creates meaning, creates impact, and makes a change, makes a difference? All right. So, this is the new patient marketing equation, a direct response marketing equation. And this was an equation I made about four years ago. It

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simplifies everything we’re trying to do, everything marketing agencies do, everything a freelancer will do for you and makes it into a very digestible single equation. So, it goes like this. Traffic times conversion equals new patients. Traffic is simply awareness. It’s visibility. It’s how many people have your attention? How many eyeballs do you have? Or how many people attention do you have? Conversion is attractiveness. How attractive are you to for someone to come in and become a patient of yours or

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whatever action it is that you want them to take? How attractive is it for them to get a fullmouth rehabilitation from you if that’s what you’re focused on? Right? So awareness times attractiveness equals result. So let’s let’s do this. Awareness times attractiveness. All right, equals the result that we’re going for, which is new patients. And like I alluded to, as an industry, we’re hyperfixated on awareness. There’s so many providers out there who are pushing you to run ads, pushing you

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to do SEO, um Google My Business, get reviews, all that to build awareness. You could argue Google reviews is attractiveness, but I would argue that it’s more for getting the um local SEO rankings anyway. So, because we focus so much on this, we’ve neglected attractiveness. We’ve neglected our ability to influence that. And so what happens is we’ve essentially made conversion and attractiveness a constant, right? I know this isn’t how you denote a constant, but you get the idea. We’re

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focused so much on building good traffic into something that might be inherently broken or something that might inherently not be operating to its potential. And when we do this, it becomes very frustrating if you don’t know how to affect the traffic because traffic today is is a commodity. It’s easy to get. Google every day is making their platform easier to advertise on, right? Other platforms are running algorithms, so it makes search and information dissemination easier. It’s better than

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ever. Traffic isn’t the problem anymore. Awareness hasn’t been the problem for a long time. Ever since the internet, it’s not a problem of people finding you. That’s not hard. The problem is how can we become attractive so much so that you get all the residual benefits. You get word of mouth, referrals, um better Google reviews, better placements on you actually get better traffic when you’re more uh attractive. So that’s the paradox. So how can we work on this? Right? That’s that’s the main argument that I’m

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trying to to tell you is let’s focus less on traffic. We have enough of it, right? If you’re not seeing results, it’s because we’re only focused on this and we need to start focusing on conversion. How do we do that? Where do we start? And it starts with who. It starts with who do you seek to serve? Right? that that age-old question. And the common exercise that agencies or consultants will do at this point is to give you a patient avatar sheet. Um I’ve seen a notable figure in the past week

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run through the same exercise as well. But that exercise is not it doesn’t cut it. Uh, and if you’re familiar with that exercise, it basically goes and h has you create a persona for the ideal patient, right? The ideal patient avatar or something like that. Um, there you’ll put their age, you’ll put their gender, you’ll put their ethnicity, you’ll put their income, you’ll put how many kids they have, you’ll put their hopes, fears, and dreams, and so on. And that will be your

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who. That will be your guiding who. The problem is that it’s way too specific. Like you might put 54 as the age, female as the age, next day you see a 30-year-old male come through the door and that patient avatar goes out the window. It’s no longer useful. And so what I’ve seen a lot of uh what I’ve seen happen a lot with my clients is they would do this patient avatar exercise and later later on like they wouldn’t even remember like after a year or two because it’s just been buried.

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Like every day is a reminder that their patient avatar was wrong. So, who isn’t an avatar? Who? Who is going to be determined by beliefs? It’s going to be a psychography. Who is a collection of people who share the same beliefs, the same beliefs about what dentistry should be like, what is good dentistry, right? What is a good doctor? They’re going to share all these beliefs. And the reason we start like that with psychography is because psychography is the grounds for decision- making.

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When I choose to visit you versus someone else, it’s because of my psychography. It’s not because of my income. It’s not because of my age. And when I visit your practice and when I what I perceive to be a good experience, when I have a good experience and when I want to share that’s all because it aligned your practice aligned with my psychography, not because I was a certain ethnicity. All right? So, we fundamentally have to shift how we understand who we’re targeting, who we’re trying to serve,

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and it’s going to be a set of belief systems. And in my free course I go through this is the first exercise is going to be determining well after change but the first exercise the second exercise is determining who and you go through and you fill out you find the five beliefs that create who. The challenge here or the mistake the trap is that we try to expand who way too big. We try to engage in mass marketing. We try to appeal to as many people as we can and that is a byproduct of hyperfixation on traffic because when

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you’re fixated on visibility, you care about mass. You care about the numbers, right? 2,000 is bigger than 1,000 and then 10 leads is bigger than eight leads. So to win the game of traffic, we have to or we win the game of traffic by watering everything down and starting to appeal to everyone, right? So now if I’m an agency, I can come to you and say, “Hey, our numbers improved.” If you ask, “How did you do that?” Well, I made you more appealing to the masses. The problem is

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as a mass today, we’re way too diverse. Back in the day, if you got went to your office, had a 10 10 milei radius, the people in that radius would be relatively similar. They would have similar beliefs. They would want to keep up with themselves. You know, you get what I’m saying, right? Keeping up with the Joneses and all that. But today, we’re way too diverse. You take that same radius and you have millions and millions of different beliefs. You have people who care about woodworking, people who care

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about swimming, people who want to save dolphins, people who care about conservation, clean energy. When we try to appeal to all those different personas, all those different beliefs, we create the average of diversity. And the average of diversity is boring. It’s meaningless. It’s a commodity. And so when you do this, you become just like everyone else. you become just another option that they browse through and you stop becoming a necessity. So what’s the alternative? So we’ve made two distinctions here.

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It’s psychography and it’s going to be non-mass at the opposite end of the spectrum. Let’s say this is mass. The opposite end would be hyperpersonalized, too personalized, trying to go to the individual and changing our practice to fit that individual’s needs. It’s too costly and you don’t have the resources to do that for everyone. So the alternative of avoiding mass and avoiding hyperpersonalization is somewhere in the middle. It’s one where you’re not average, where you’re

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not trying to appeal to everyone. So we pull back a bit, but it’s also you’re not hyperpersonalized. You’re not trying to appease everyone. So we push it forward a bit. So now in this area, you get the best of both worlds. You get to avoid commoditization. You get to avoid avoid being average. And you also get to scale. You get to avoid the troubles of being too costly to scale. Right? So we have to let me let me do this. Let’s call it scale. Your scale has to be smaller. How people go and tend to engage,

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especially when they’re traffic focused, is they’re way too wide. They’re trying to appeal to everyone. They’re commoditized. They’re they’re fighting prices. They’re they’re having price wars. If you look at how advertising works right now on Google ads, everyone is competing to lower their prices on Google ads so that people can choose them. It’s terrible. And this is the game that I want you to escape to get out of. It’s not about price wars anymore. It’s about aligning

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so much so to the who creating something so much in their benefit that for their psychology, for their beliefs of this is how dentistry should be done. you become the exception. You become a need, right? People need dentistry. They don’t need your specific office until you can choose to provide it or until you choose to provide it in the way that benefits them. So, it starts with who, right? Um I I said there was a first exercise that comes that precedes who and that is the change that you believe in. But I’m

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going to assume that that’s kind of innate and if you want to go deeper into that, check out my course. All right. So to change but a brief synopsis is change the change that you intend to bring is going to be one of behavioral change. What is the market doing that I believe should they shouldn’t be doing that they should be doing something else. What is the better path forward that I see for other people right that’s the change we start with and then we go and find who is going to align with that change who

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is most likely to believe in that change. Right. So after we start with who the next is to you might have guessed it align your practice to benefit them right but we have to go one step deeper into who first. So point one a and this is the concept of early adopters. Early adopters, mainstream and late adopters. Right? Early adopters, mainstream, and late adopters. If I asked you who do we build your practice for and you say it’s the who, you would be partially correct. And that’s only because

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when you take a statistically statistically significant sample size of any group, you get what’s called a normal distribution. And I’m sure you’ve heard of this before. Here at minus one standard deviation you get what’s called the early adopters and here you have the mainstream and here you have the late adopters. All right mainstream accounts for about 68% late adopters about 16 early adopters about 16. So let me talk about this for a second. When you get a statistically significant

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sample size, we start to notice a distri a normal distribution of attributes. So height, weight, age, IQ, all these things are normally distributed. But a psychologist found that this also holds true for behavior. So how many movies have people watched in the past year? um how do they like how do what’s their adoption behavior? Are they quick to adopt new things? Are they do they follow the herd or are they late? Do they only adopt things when they’re forced to? All right. So, this idea

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that even in a specific psychography of people that you chose, there’s going to be differences in how they approach adoption of new behavior. So the early adopters, they’re dissatisfied. They’re inherently dissatisfied with their current conditions. And and one quick note is that you might be an early adopter in something like tech or you might but you might be a mainstream for something else like music and you might be a late adopter for something else like maybe a car. All right. So what are you an early

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adopter of? What are you mainstream of? What are you a late adopter of? That’s a good exercise for you to kind of empathetically see what other people um engage with. All right. Anyway, back to it. So, the early adopters are inherently dissatisfied. And why is this? So, in dentistry, maybe they’ve had a bad experience. Maybe they’re unhappy with their provider or maybe they see the options in the marketplace in their local area and they have general like dental anxiety and no one does it

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right. No one does it the way that they think dentistry should be. Right? So, for whatever reason, these people are dissatisfied and they’re looking for better. That’s going to be key. The early adopters are looking for better. Let me switch colors here. So the mainstream are looking for safe. They’re looking for what is what are other people doing? They want to follow the herd. They’re unlike the early early adopters. They’re not out there trying to try new stuff because it’s risky for

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them. Right now they’re okay, right? Even if they believe that dentistry should be like this the way that you want to do it, they might be okay. They might be satisfied enough. It doesn’t hurt enough yet or they’re not dissatisfied enough yet to go out and make the changes that the early adopters are doing. The risky, the um sometimes painful, the trial and error of finding better. These people truly care about it. And the late adopters, you have to force them. They have to be forced to adopt whatever

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change you want them to make. But we’re not going to engage with forcing people to do anything here. So for our for our purposes, the late adopters are just out of the equation. All right. All right. So when we build our practice, that’s why we have to start with the early adopters. If we if we try to build for the mainstream, it’s tempting because there’s a lot of them. Early adopters, you’re looking at 16%. These two, you’re looking at 84%. And we’re purposely saying no to the 84%

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for now. Because if we try to create something for the mainstream and again this is not masses of the masses we have your niche group that is your um belief system and from that niche group we have this normal distribution and so it’s tempting to go for the mainstream because we’ve already narrowed it. How are we going to narrow it again? But the mainstream are too comfortable. They’re too satisfied and it takes too much energy. It’s too costly to make someone dissatisfied. Like you might be satisfied about

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something. Let’s say you’re satisfied with the current phone you have. How do you feel when you look at an advertisement for a new iPhone? Like it just doesn’t even register in your mind. And so the approach we’ve been trying to take to break into the mainstream has been repetition, repetition, repetition, right? There’s this there’s the like rules of like you have to hit someone 28 times for them to notice you or whatever it is. It’s insane. and and the costs of doing that are too high. We can’t engage

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in that sustainably anymore. So that’s why we start with the early adopters. These people are eager and willing for your change. These people are too satisfied. And later we’ll design a system of getting the early adopters to bring in the mainstream to create a culture around this to have them bring in the mainstream and adopt the same behaviors that they’re taking which is choosing your um choosing your change, choosing to align with what what it is that you have to bring to the world. All right. So that’s why when we

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start designing our practice, we start with the early adopters. All right. So two, let me go back to blue. So in my course we actually go into touch points and other stuff but the overall idea is that we want to be aware of what decisions that our patients are going to have to make in this journey in this journey of you and them. There’s a lot of decisions to be made. Let’s say this is them. And let’s say this is your office. I don’t know why I drew that line, but let’s say that’s your office.

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For them to trust you enough to become a patient of yours to accept treatment, it’s going to take several decisions. And it’s also going to each decision is going to require more and more trust each time. All right. So decisions of um I’m going to check out their website. I’m going to book an appointment. I’m going to actually show up. I’m going to like sit through and wait. I’m going to accept treatment or not. Like all these decisions they have to make and we have to be aware of how they make these

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decisions. But the first decision is the decision to learn more about you to take their precious attention like attention a scarce resource that we we like to go out there and violate when we’re focused on traffic. We like to go and say, “Hey, I paid $3. You need to pay attention to me.” Right? But um anyway, they give that attention to us when we’re able to do one thing, right? And that is differentiate right this whole process of understanding their motivations and differentiating and creating something

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better for them like it’s a loop and let me see if I can explain better but we have um differentiation and honestly I think that should be two but like it’s part of of um decisions so differentiation is something that it’s buzz word that people like to throw out. We need to differentiate. We need to like unique selling proposition. We need to work on our unique selling proposition. And I don’t think people really understand what that means. So differentiation is not just promoting

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one thing. It’s not saying on your website that you’re the best dentist or you’re the most gentle or you’re the most caring. Everyone is saying that. When you differentiate that way, you become another commodity. true differentiation. So, what’s the difference? What what like why do some people why can’t they wrap their heads around differentiation? Well, I think it’s because again, it goes back to traffic and mass marketing. They’re trying to appeal to everyone. How? What

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is and it’s too safe. When you try to appeal to everyone, you have to play it safe. And of course, the things that are safe are things like being gentle, being caring, being transparent, being trustworthy, right? Th this is that’s not how you differentiate. How you differentiate has to start with this who what is the belief system specifically what’s the belief system of the early adopters right when you can start with what they care about what’s meaningful to them and you differentiate you create your

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practice in a way that is truly different and authentically fundamentally different than other practices in service of this then you have differentiation right it doesn’t have to be as elegant as saying that you’re already or as elegant as saying that you’re the most gentle. That that’s taken care of. Functionally, everyone’s caught up. Everyone delivers dentistry more or less to a good degree, right? And it’s less about function. It’s less about following the rules better and it’s more

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about breaking the rules so that we can deliver a more meaningful experience. Right? So again in my course my free course there’s a exercise on differentiation on how you identify what’s meaningful to these people to determine the two or three axes that you’re going to choose how you’re going to differentiate and to align that you’re you’re making a decision at this point that our practice is going to take a stand for this our practice is going to mean this right that is true

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differentiation so differentiation earns us attention why because early adopters Sorry, I erased the diagram, but early adopters are always searching for better. How do they notice better? Well, just like any other animal, we notice differences. We notice movement. We notice changes. And so, they’re out there, they they’re looking for what’s better. And so, when they see a truly differentiated practice, not not one that just says that we’re different on our website, like one where

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everything is changed in service for, let’s say, like dental anxiety. Let’s say that office doesn’t even look like a dental office anymore because the feeling of being in a dental office is spiking anxiety for people. So, they’ve fundamentally gone and changed the layout of everything. They’ve made it look more like a lounge than an office, right? That’s different. It’s not the same old office just saying that, hey, we’re good with people who have anxiety, right? It it’s aligning everything in

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service so much so that it creates meanings. It creates a profound meaning of this is better. All right. So after you differentiate, you get the early adopters and then back to the decisions now. So the first decision first decision was to even try you out. And that happens when we notice differences. And we’re going to have to make more decisions now. We’re going to have to make those decisions that I talked about earlier. Booking, showing up, accepting. All right? And and it builds more and

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more trust or it requires more and more trust, right? When when when you have someone here who’s in for a fullmouth rehab, it’s a big investment that they have to make, it requires a lot of trust. How do you build this? Well, trust comes from consistency. If I show up to you on day one as a certain way, and on day two I show up a different way, it’s inconsistent and you don’t know what to believe about me. But if I show up the same way day after day after day after day, on the next day,

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you’re going to expect that I show up the same way. Right? Let’s say you go to my YouTube channel and you find that all my other videos are on, I don’t know, playing video games. Then you’re going to have a fundamentally different perspective on on who I am, right? And there’s going to be broken trust there, right? So trust differentiation enables trust and it enables consistency. it it enables it’s a northstar that we can start aligning our experience towards. What most practices do is they kind of

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have an idea the owner has an idea of what they think is better and so they’ll like do all these things but for the core group that they weren’t even aware of. It’s too it’s too out of alignment. One thing aligns with their idea of what is better, another thing is out of alignment. One thing’s good, another thing’s out. Right? But when we’re able to create differentiation in service of a certain psychography, then we’re able to align every aspect, every touch point

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of your office. So a touch point is just the moment that someone experiences you as an office. So it could be your website, it could be um the script that the receptionist picks up with. It could be the actual interior architecture. It could be the driveway. It could be the parking lot. Right? all these touch points in service of that. Right now, we’re too unintentional with our touch points. We have all these opportunities to create a memorable moment for people and we don’t do it. We don’t take

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advantage of that. All right? So, differentiation allows us to create better touch points, touch points that are in alignment and therefore create consistency and therefore create trust. So trust goes up as they experience more touch points and then boom, decision one, check out your office, more touch points, decision two, book an appointment, right? It requires every step requires more more trust and touch points are the opportunity for us to build trust and we have to build it in a way that is aligned to what they want to

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what they think is better, right? Because better is not what we think. We think better might be following the rules better. It might be better clinical ability. It might be efficiency. It might be um I don’t know like whatever it is like whatever like like being more high-tech. Whatever it is you believe to be better doesn’t matter. What matters is what they believe to be better and differentiating in a way that creates that meaning. All right. This is how dentistry should be. and differentiating in a way that’s like

00:30:12
okay I get it now that is better right so once we do this now we have people that have aligned and trust and they’ve come through your practice they’ve come and accepted treatment all right and they’ve had a very good experience that they will have in no other office because no other office is doing this work so two things happen here one they love it and two they start to tell people about it if the right conditions are there. So our our understanding of referrals and how people spread the word is

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fundamentally missing some pieces. Let me explain. So now we’ve done the hard work of differentiating and creating something so valuable to the early adopters that they can’t help but love it. Right? So we’ve we’ve gotten them like we we’ve created something for them. Um and we’ve gone as a quick side note like this is what this is when traffic comes in. We built something for the early adopters. We differentiated. We created all our touch points. Now bring in the traffic. Now get people through the

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system, right? We we we we rush too fast to do traffic before we’ve done this work. And that’s why it’s causing problems. Like when you’ve done this, you’ve really nailed conversions. You’ve raised your attractiveness. All right. Anyway, so okay, one other note is so traffic should be a means to an end. Traffic like my goal is to have our clients graduate. Like we want them to use traffic to fill this engine to eventually build referrals so that they don’t need to work on traffic anymore

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because the traffic is built into the system. All right. But too many agencies these days they focus on retention, client retention. How can we satisfy them so they stay retained? It’s not about graduation. Like imagine if schools focused on student retention and not student graduation, right? That’s not the point. Like the point is to help people like help you get to where you’re trying to go. Anyway, that’s when traffic comes in. All right. So now we now we’ve built this. We

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create advertisements and things to fill that funnel to get people to notice the difference because if we just create it and let it sit, no one’s going to it’s it’s hard to notice. Like people are using the internet to get information. So if you don’t know how to get your information out there, of course it’s not going to be served. So traffic does have a function. It’s just we’ve overemphasized it. All right. So back to this idea of um early adopters and creating referrals. So, it’s tempting to

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believe that if we create a very good experience for the early adopters that they’re going to go out there and selfish selflessly share your practice with all their friends and family. And to some degree that might be true, but many times that doesn’t happen. And why does that not happen? And typically it’s because of a negative network effect. A network effect, a positive network effect is where the more people that come, the better things get. A negative network effect is the more people that

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come, the worse the thing gets. So, examples of negative network effects are traffic, too many people at the beach, right? These are negative uh network effects. Positive network effects, things like social media. If I’m on Instagram alone, not much is happening. But if me and all my friends are on Instagram, then it’s fun, right? So, how can we create positive network effects in your practice? This is the key because otherwise there is no incentive for early adopters to go out and share. An

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example of something where people really enjoy but won’t share is like a surfer finds a really good surf spot, but he’s not going to go and tell the masses. he’s not going to go or sorry the mainstream because he doesn’t want people he doesn’t want to create that negative network effect of having just random surfers blocking his waves right so we have to be very intentional with how we’re going to inject a network effect into your practice right here’s how to do that

00:35:02
so the early adopters have come in they’ve experienced you and they believe that you um they believe in your change the things that you do differently. They believe in it. They’ve bought into it. And another idea is that everyone here, everyone who has this who shares this psychography, even if they’re not early adopters, we have a current feeling and a desired feeling. This is how you get people to make decisions. You show them how they’re currently feeling, current feelings, desired feelings.

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when you get someone to make a decision. And this is the essence of sales. This is the essence of treatment um or or sorry, treatment um presentation. You’re showing them how they currently feel. You’re showing them the x-rays. You’re showing them the diagnosis. And you’re showing them how they can feel, the desired feeling. Right? If they come into your office, you show them all these things. You show them the X-rays. You show them, hey, you need this treatment. Why do some people

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say no? It’s because their desired feeling wasn’t aligned with you in the first place. They don’t care for health. Like, we assume that everyone is going to want the same things that we do. Some people don’t care for that feeling. They don’t care to feel like their teeth are in good shape. Maybe it’s more meaningful for them to feel like their finances are in order. Maybe that feeling is stronger. But with when we get this is this is another reason why we target the psychography so much. People with a

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similar psychography are going to have similar desired feelings. So regardless of where they’re currently feeling, someone might be here, someone might be here, they all want to achieve, they all want to reach that desired feeling, right? So you might have a desired feeling about um fashion when you decide what you’re going to wear. You might have a desired feeling. The purpose, what we’re trying to do at every point in our practice, our existence is to help people achieve this desired feeling. And your treatment

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would be the ultimate connector, right? When when someone takes the first step, when they check out your website or whatever it is, we help them get to their desired feeling a little bit. if they consume my videos on YouTube or something, I’m helping them get to their desired feeling a little bit. Like if I’m assuming that your desired feeling is to feel more confident and have more clarity about growing your practice, right? And so I’m giving you a touch of that and I’m inviting you to take the

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next step, which is to take my course, which I’m going to promise is going to do a bit more and get you a bit closer to that desired feeling. Right? So that that’s the that’s what we’re engaging with, right? every step bringing them closer to their desired feeling to the point where we get them to ultimately make the change, accept treatment, and you make the promise that, hey, if you do, we’re going to get you to that desired feeling. I’m going to take you to the promised land.

00:38:14
Right? So, why is this important? Why do I Why did I just go on this 10-minute ramble or what, however long it was. So, everyone here, everyone here wants this desired feeling. So what we do is we create a shared activity around it. And this is popping up more and more. But one sec, let me write this down. This method of creating a community of you being a leader that organizes a community of people who want the same things. This idea has been around for a while, but it hasn’t been done intentionally.

00:38:57
It’s been done by groups of people who want to do similar things. And it’s really prevalent if you go look at Facebook groups. People just coming together for no specific reason, right? Or well, well, for their own for them, for themselves, they have a specific reason, but they’re just gathering. And that gathering, that gathering is started by a leader. And so what I’m challenging you to do now is that we have to create a community around a shared activity, an activity that helps people get closer to

00:39:32
their desired feelings with each other, a positive network effect. All right? And it’s not as straightforward as creating a Facebook group for, you know, Isaac O’s dental office and inviting people to join it. There’s a lot of groups out there that try that and you’ll see a lot of ghost towns like groups with maybe 12 members, zero posts in the last year, right? Because that community is inherently selfish. It’s inherently for the leader, not the members. On the other side of the token,

00:40:06
there’s communities with like a million million people in it. There’s communities in your local city in La Habra and Fullerton and they’re thriving because it’s helping all the members achieve whatever desired feeling it is. Like I just saw one today about like woodworking, right? 600,000 members and they’re all there were like 19 posts this morning and it’s like 7 a.m. So, we create a shared activity that helps people in this psychography create a desired feeling a little bit

00:40:37
more, right? And this is open-ended and I won’t get too much into it. Again, check out my course if you want to dive deeper. When we do this, we create culture. We create a group of people who share the same similar beliefs, who do similar activities, right? We create a culture. And as this culture grows and grows, they’re going to start bringing in the mainstream. Why? Positive network effect. and two shared activity. It’s aligned around the same thing everyone wants. And when this happens now, the culture

00:41:16
starts to adopt similar behaviors. When the mainstream join, they’re going to follow the herd. They’re going to do what the early adopters are doing. And guess what? One thing the early adopters are doing is choosing you, is choosing your practice, choosing your change, talking to people about it. And that’s how we create referrals. It’s not referrals about it’s not referrals from me to my family anymore because I have a very different psychography than my mom than my sister

00:41:42
and my brother and my dad. Right? People are too diverse today. And so we have to group by psychography, right? And so that’s how you create referrals. I kind of lost touch with all the different steps here, but I hope you’re beginning to see how marketing is fundamentally different. How it’s not just about traffic anymore. It’s not about this little thing. Now, I got invited to speak at the uh Korean-American Dental Association’s um business conference and I was asked to talk about traffic and I

00:42:23
said, “No, I won’t talk about traffic because of this. It’s it’s too different now.” and and our understanding of what good marketing is has to change. We have to engage at a much more profound deeper level and we have to serve we have to serve people’s emotions. We have to serve feelings. It’s not about function anymore. Function is taken care of. We have entire support systems that make sure your function won’t fail. like that make sure that people have a baseline

00:42:54
experience of health like baseline functional experience. So it’s about intentionally doing the hard work of creating this experience creating this thing. So in in in favor of people’s desired feelings we’re trying to get them to the promised land. People want to go somewhere and they need a leader who’s going to take them there. All right. In modern cognitive um behavioral theory, the thesis is that human beings don’t make decisions based on rational choice. We make decisions based on feelings.

00:43:32
Right? And my challenge to you is to create something in service of those feelings. Thanks.