How to Own the Market: A New Paradigm

The last few weeks as I’ve been working with clients and putting my marketing and social-media webinar together, a powerful idea started to enter my thoughts. This concept really took hold when I began reading a fascinating book by Jeff Jarvis called “What Would Google Do?” You see, Google is the fastest-growing company in the entire history of the world and it accomplished this with no marketing.

It grew entirely by word of mouth and because its leaders understood better than anyone else how the world had changed and how to best ride the wave. They understood that in today’s world there is no longer a “mass media,” that the customer is now truly king or queen, and that there is a “mass of niches.”

Today, with the stroke of a blog post people can start a firestorm of protest against your business. Many mistakenly run for cover from this new world. The huge successes take a different tactic and embrace the paradigm. They look for more opportunities to engage their customers and to participate and encourage the dialog. They also take to heart what they hear, the complaints and the suggestions for innovation or improvement. They build trust and loyalty, not because they are perfect, but because they listen.

Let’s bring this back to the reality of your world managing an urgent care center. You are not an Internet business and you may be thinking “that’s just not how it works in medicine,” “we have all kinds or parameters, and responsibilities, and we’re dealing with people’s lives,” “medicine is different,” and “I have to have a huge marketing budget.”

My question to you is... is it really any different? Yahoo and AOL also stuck with the old view of the world and were left in the dust by Google. What if you opened that door in your thought process just a little and asked, “What if the world really has changed? What if there really is a different or better way? What if I didn’t run and market my urgent care like everyone else? What if I dared to innovate and be different? How can I be the “Google” of my local medical community? How can I really own my market?”

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