Reading the local market without naming names

Two views of the same market

There are two useful ways to look at the clinics around you, and they answer different questions. The plan view asks what exists: how many clinics, offering what, at what apparent price level, with what visibility. The elevation view asks what is missing: which questions nobody answers, which stages of the journey nobody serves, which patient group nobody addresses.

Clinics almost always do the plan and stop, which produces a list of competitors and a vague sense of being outgunned. The elevation is the useful one, because gaps are actionable and headcounts are not.

What to look at

Work from what is publicly published, in your catchment, for the treatments on your build list from Module 07, Choosing the treatments to compete on. For each, note the following without recording clinic names in anything you will publish.

• Depth. Is the typical page a few hundred words of brochure copy, or is it substantial? This tells you what it will take to be the best answer.
• Coverage. Which of the six journey stages from Module 03, The patient journey, from symptom to booking are served? Almost always stages four to six only.
• Questions answered. Which of the six question families from Module 15 are addressed anywhere in your area?
• Price transparency. Does anybody publish a range with the variables named?
• Assurance material. Are practitioners named with roles and registration?

An hour of this is worth more than any paid competitive analysis, because you are reading the same pages a patient reads, in the same order.

What you may never publish

The survey is for you. Almost none of it may be published, and the reasons are both regulatory and practical.

Comparative claims about identified competitors must be capable of substantiation and must not mislead. In practice a clinic cannot substantiate a claim that it is better than a named competitor, because it has not assessed that competitor's work and could not do so lawfully or meaningfully. The CAP Code treats denigration and unsubstantiated comparison seriously, and a complaint from a named competitor is the easiest complaint in the world to make.

This publication does not rank clinics or agencies, and neither should your clinic's website. A ranked list you cannot substantiate is a liability dressed as content.

The same applies to any "top clinics" or "best in town" list, whether or not you appear on it. If you did not assess the businesses on it against stated criteria you can produce, you have published an advertisement in the shape of an article, and the fact that it ranks well is not a defence.

Finding the gaps

A gap is a question a patient in your area is asking that nobody local answers well. Three kinds recur.

Stage gaps. Nobody serves the symptom stage. Everybody has a page named after the procedure and nobody has a page named after the thing the patient sees in the mirror.

Question gaps. Everybody answers what a treatment is. Almost nobody answers what happens if you do not like the result, who pays for correction, or what the two weeks afterwards actually feel like.

Group gaps. Everybody writes to the same implied reader. Nobody writes to the person who is nervous about looking treated, or the person with a specific medical history, or the person who has had a poor experience elsewhere and is frightened of a second one.

Positioning against a gap

Positioning against a gap means occupying it, not announcing it. You do not write "unlike other clinics, we explain recovery properly". You write the recovery explanation, thoroughly, and let the absence elsewhere speak.

This is a discipline, and it is the difference between a publication a patient trusts and a brochure they discount. It is also the safer route under every rule in Module 05, The rules that constrain everything you publish, because a page that describes only your own practice makes no comparative claim at all.

Keeping the survey current

Once a quarter, an hour, the same five columns. Markets move slowly and the point is not to react quickly; it is to notice when a gap you occupy is being closed, which usually happens over several quarters and is invisible if you only look once.

Record the survey in a private document with dates. Never publish it, never quote it in marketing, and do not let it become an anxiety exercise. Its only purpose is to keep the build list in Module 07, Choosing the treatments to compete on pointed at territory where you can win.