By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business

Disrupters love markets with broken consumer experiences. You could argue that nowhere is this more acute than in the healthcare industry, and in dentistry the mother of all disrupters is Smile Direct Club. Its cofounders Jordan Katzman and Alex Fenkell started the company in 2014 after coming across government data that said six out of ten counties in the US didn’t have access to an orthodontist.

So they created a direct to consumer strategy that removed the need for patients to visit a dental practice at all while slashing the cost by half (£1,499 versus the usual £3k or more). There are copycats already, and Smile Direct Club is a behemoth. Its revenue jumped 190% to $423m in 2018 and climbed another 113% in the first half of this year. Despite vociferous challenges from dentists and regulators the company raised $1.35bn in an initial public offering in September, valuing the firm at $8bn.

Meanwhile its losses have been climbing sharply due to a huge marketing spend of more than half of its 2018 revenue on social media, television and billboards. That’s more than $211m. What this really means is that Smile Direct Club is a marketing company, not an orthodontic system. Its 125-strong in-house marketing team has enabled it to play another highly disruptive hand.

In May it ran a campaign in New York including taxi TV spots, digital subway and newsstand ads and a digital billboard in Times Square. After the Times Square ad went live the team was told it had an additional billboard spot and three hours later a brand new ad went live. A writer, art director and animator came up with a concept and a prototype and workshopped it with the team that quickly.

The online media news site Digiday, which reported on this, found in a survey of 73 client-side marketing executives that 77% had ended a relationship with an ad agency because they were dissatisfied with the quality of campaigns delivered. In contrast Smile Direct Club, which is aggressive on “virtually all” digital channels, has kept its content high quality while responding quickly to what’s working well.

The marketing team handles creative in Smile Direct Club’s stores across the US, Puerto Rico, Canada, Australia and the UK and in paid and brand marketing. Its chief creative officer Bruce Henderson said: “We have weekly and daily updates along the lines of, ‘This ad’s performing really well, so let’s expand this across platforms quickly.’ We’re learning and responding every day to what customers want.” So simple, so obvious and yet still novel in dentistry.

The efficiencies this firm has gained through technology and its partnerships with retail outlets (Macy’s, Welgreens and CVS in the US, Well Pharmacy in the UK) have created a business model that will be easily scalable across the world, and I bet their customers are so ecstatic with the product and the price that they generate a ton of referrals.

Orthodontists who say that a diagnosis can’t happen in three clicks should give Smile Direct Club credit — it has created a brand that people trust. It says that while customers have the luxury of not having to visit a practice, they’re never left alone during the treatment process. In the US it partners with 200+ dentists and orthodontists, each of whom has had at least four years of Invisalign practice, to review a customer’s teeth scans or imprints.

Patients can visit a retail outlet, retail partner or make their own impressions at home with a kit, and for those unlikely to seek treatment through a dentist or orthodontist the difference means a lot. The company was smart to spot a gap in the market by reaching out to people who had already had braces but hadn’t worn their retainers. They were familiar with treatment but would never have stomached paying for conventional treatment again, so everyone’s laughing. Apart from the old guard. The true sign of a disrupter.

Now, you don’t have to be a direct to consumer innovator like Smile Direct Club to be a disrupter and win big in dentistry, but you will need to think like one and adopt some of their strategies for your business: a retail approach, be 100% patient-centric and dominate digital marketing. I’d love to help you in this challenge.