Writing the clinic's proposition

What a proposition is for

A proposition is a working document, not a piece of copy. Its job is to make later decisions faster: which treatments to build pages for, which questions to answer, which photographs to take, which enquiries to decline. A clinic without one makes each of those decisions afresh every time, usually in favour of whatever is most in demand that month.

It follows that a proposition is only useful if it excludes something. A sentence that would apply comfortably to any clinic excludes nothing and therefore decides nothing. That is the source of the substitution test later in this module.

The three parts

Who it is for

A named group with a named concern in a named place. "Women in their forties concerned about volume loss, within reach of a single town" is a proposition fragment. "Anyone who wants to look their best" is not, because it identifies nobody and therefore prioritises nothing.

Clinic owners resist this because it feels like turning away business. It is not: patients outside the description still book, and they book more readily from a clinic that clearly stands for something than from one that stands for everything. What narrowing changes is what you write about first.

What is different

Something a patient could verify. A specific approach to consultation, a specific refusal, a specific way you handle review appointments, a specific limit on what you will do in one sitting. Differences of this kind are frequently operational rather than clinical, and that is fine. They are also the ones competitors cannot copy quickly, because copying them means changing how the clinic runs.

Why it is credible

Registration, training, years in practice, the volume of a particular procedure, membership of a voluntary register such as the JCCP. Facts, dated, and stated in a form somebody could check. This is the part that serves the influencer role described in Module 02, Who decides, and how they choose.

The substitution test

Write your proposition, then imagine a competent clinic three streets away copying it word for word onto their own site. Would anything about it be untrue for them?

If nothing would be untrue, you have written a description of the category, not of your clinic. This is the single most common outcome on a first attempt, and it is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that the differences have not yet been articulated, usually because they are so familiar to the person running the clinic that they do not register as differences at all.

The things a clinic takes for granted are usually the things a patient would find remarkable. The proposition is where you go looking for them.

A useful prompt when stuck: what do you routinely refuse to do that others in your area will do? Refusals are extremely legible to patients and are almost impossible to copy insincerely.

Adjectives and their replacements

Adjectives are the enemy of a proposition for two reasons. They are unverifiable, which makes them worthless as evidence, and several of them are actively risky under the advertising rules covered in Module 05, The rules that constrain everything you publish.

The replacement column is longer than the adjective column in every row. That is the trade: a proposition costs words and buys specificity. Specificity is what a reader remembers and what a search engine can match to a query.

Where the proposition actually lives

Not, in the first instance, on the About page. The proposition's most important placement is in the top third of the pages a patient actually lands on, which are the treatment pages and the answer pages, in compressed form, in the reader's language.

In practice this means one sentence of proposition near the top of every important page, phrased as information rather than as a claim. The full three-part version belongs on the About page for the people who go looking, and its phrasing there can be longer and more careful. Module 10, The anatomy of a treatment page specifies where it sits inside a treatment page, and Module 11, The opening 120 words deals with the opening block in detail.

What to do when there is no difference yet

Sometimes the truthful answer is that the clinic is not yet different in any way a patient would notice. This is common in a clinic's first two years and it is not a marketing problem. It is an operations problem wearing a marketing disguise.

The response is to choose a difference and then build it, rather than to write one and hope. A difference that can be built within a quarter is worth more than one that sounds better and never arrives. Candidates that clinics have built quickly: a written treatment plan given to every patient, a fixed review appointment included in every price, a published policy on what happens if the patient is unhappy, a standing refusal to treat on the day of consultation.

All four of those are operational commitments. All four are verifiable. None of them requires a new device, a new qualification or a larger budget. Choose one, implement it, then write it into the proposition and into every page. That sequence is the right way round.