Editor's Corner
Today's Consumers and the Coming "Age of Services"
Dr. E. Brian Smith
The AAO has done a marvelous job for decades now overseeing and informing our potential patients, our consumers, on the benefits and merits of receiving treatment regarding Orthodontics and Craniofacial Orthopedics. Our early pioneers and mentors of orthodontics created many outstanding universities programs that have become the finest global health care delivery system in the world for correction of malocclusion with leading edge technology and evidence based dentistry that a grand future can envision.
I recently attended a CE course given by an expert in the field on practice management who claimed that the #1 focal issue our patients want to know today is not: "Do I need treatment?", but rather, "Where will I receive my treatment?" This is an important paradigm shift of the new generation and a very fundamental perspective elevating the importance of services over product. In other words, our newest generations of consumers (the children of Gen-Xers) are bringing forth with them the dawning of the "Age of Services" and the closing of the "Age of Information" (which should take at least a decade or more to transition fully). To be sure this is happening all across sectors in our economy, not just ours, and is evident in the way all money is spent.
Many dentists of the baby boom generation will labor to understand the coming of the upside down means of an economy based on services over product. While it is nonetheless important to provide and pursue perfection clinically in a treatment bay with a modern dental chair and a hand piece, the greatest financial rewards will go to those who understand the melding results of globalization in a highly mobile society combined with the CEO mentality of networking, marketing, branding, and advertising. This is just the way it has become In modern America, and with it the change brings opportunity and some real heart ache.
Let's consider a parallel emerging industry, where the average American coffee drinker who today consumes 3.4 cups of coffee per day. This translates to 3.5 million cups per day. A frugal do-it-yourself consumer of the post WWII generation would most likely heat a pot of water, pour it in a cup, brew in the condiments, let it steep and then drink it as a product of their own hands which will cost them less than fifty cents. This is the way their parents did it, they do it, and they used a solid decision process to purchase the product, good vs. bad, taste vs. texture, but with always a predictable and defined result. In the "Age of Services," parents will add to the coffee beans a high tech store front, lots of advertising, assembly line service and subtle entertainment value, and for that cup of coffee today's consumers might pay ten times the cost of the product (with inflation), due to a value added premium of 500% or more for the services, and the decision be based almost totally on the package not the product.
I ask where do coffee beans fit into article based on IT? In IT, technology is the key part of any product-service combination package that makes the information you receive a part your product worth paying for today and also tomorrow. In 2010, who knows what the norm will be, but for now we are still in the past "Age of Technology", but all most likely soon to be in the new coming "Age of Expanded Services."