Targeting and Positioning for a Small Dental Clinic

Of course, looking for a real estate location where competition is less intense and where family-based care can be provided is also a targeting and positioning strategy. Just finding the right real estate location alone can open up an opportunity not just for survival, but for a big success. But if that is not the case—if you are prepared to endure fierce competition in a large commercial district or a battleground area—then you absolutely need a deeper targeting and positioning strategy beyond location.

To choose a target means imagining a single person who would be fully satisfied consuming the services or goods I provide. When preparing to open a practice, you can feel a vague anxiety, as if “I need to do this too, and that too.” Because of that, you stop thinking about the target of your business itself and simply look at the general characteristics of the people living nearby, ending up with a half-baked target and a half-baked position. Of course, if you are opening in a resident-based, enclosed neighborhood market, that may be the more reasonable strategy. Still, I think it is worth thinking deeply at least once about targeting and positioning in order to differentiate your clinic from already established competitors. This is especially important when you are not just serving the surrounding residential population, but aiming at a broader area from a central commercial district.

When you choose one consumer with certain characteristics as your target, you should prepare your services with the mindset that if it is not that person, then no one else will seek out this service. In reality, all small businesses that narrow their audience and try to build sharp branding end up being seized by fear such as, “What if the focus is too narrow and no one but those people ever comes?” I believe that great brands are created only by enduring that point well. I think it is not too late to target the broader market beyond the truly important core consumers after first narrowing the focus and establishing a position. Of course, there is a problem with targeting a market that is objectively too small and too niche. I wrote about how to assess that in the latter half of the book Dental Practice Entry Point, so buying and reading the book once would be helpful.

Dental Practice Entry Point

Author So Hyun-su Publisher Gunja Publishing Release 2025.02.05.

Answers like “I can do everything well” are, for the most part, no longer desirable. Unlike casually saying it in a joking way to patients who come to see me, the era when saying, in a serious and polished manner, “I do everything well” in advertising would work will not return. For small clinics like ours, I think the strategy of the local top hospital that dominates the market is still valid, and in fact it is appropriate for them to take that approach. But even they now use a division-of-labor strategy like, “Dr. A is good at A, Dr. B is good at B, Dr. C is good at C, and Dr. D is good at D,” even if it is only for show. This happens not only in dentistry, but also in the MD private practice market. If you pass by a general hospital, you have probably seen banners such as, <Hired OOO, former professor of gastroenterology at OO University Hospital>.

Especially among younger patients, it is uncommon to put all of one’s care into a single hospital. A treatment goes to this hospital, B treatment to another, C treatment to Seoul... Medical shopping like this has become normal. With more information and more convenient transportation, I really do think it has become a natural thing. In other words, it is time for small shops like ours to need distinctive targeting and positioning. Dentists certainly need to be generalists in some respects, but patients want specialists. You should not get trapped in the idea that “a dentist must be a generalist.” And you should not feel reassured just because you have a nationally certified specialist qualification.

That does not mean, however, that you should prepare only one weapon tailored to a small market. You should prepare tools in various fields, but what you present must be refined and delivered as a clear message. For example, in this era when clear aligners led by Invisalign are the marketing trend, is lingual orthodontics really unattractive? I clearly think it can be a strength. In fact, I think it is better than promoting clear aligners. That is because not only competing dental clinics, but even orthodontic appliance suppliers, are all thinking only about clear aligners these days. If you think the issue with lingual orthodontic appliances is that orthodontics is difficult and inconvenient, then go ahead and open your n-th clear aligner clinic. That is my branding perspective, meaning my targeting and positioning perspective.

My revenue seems to be hovering around the top 25% among dental clinics in Seoul right now. If I give the exact numbers, some doctors preparing to open a practice may probably be disappointed. If you open a small solo dental clinic in Seoul, it is realistically difficult to achieve very high revenue. Even being in the top 25% is still far from 100 million won per month. Since 88.70 million won is the cutoff for the top 15%. Because I do not do orthodontics, my revenue is not artificially inflated, and because I do not touch early caries or arrested caries cases at the C1–C2 boundary, my revenue is not as high as one might expect.

That said, I wanted to create an environment where I could work comfortably and focused by keeping the number of patients low while increasing the average revenue per patient, and that is why I chose the current skilled-clinic concept. So although I chose such a battleground location, and although I kept writing about that process in this blog as a diary while preparing to open, there probably were not many doctors who believed this concept could actually generate revenue at this level. (In fact, there were a few doctors who commented that it would not work.) That is because the traditional opening formula defaults to bringing in “a large number of patients.” When I wrote my opening diary and said I was making a “choice that goes against recent practice-opening trends,” the doctors who encouraged me were mostly those who understood my concept and were actually running their clinics that way. I think they could understand this concept precisely because they were doing it in practice.

What I want to talk about at the practice-opening seminar is exactly that point: a concept you can understand because you are actually doing it. That is the survival model for a small clinic. It will be a little different from the existing survival models for small practices. In the past, small practices had unbelievably low fixed costs. For doctors preparing to open a small clinic in a battleground area today, what is needed is not the story of a large clinic owner, but the story of a small clinic like this one. I was lucky enough to meet doctors like that through my blog, and at seminars I learned not only clinical practice but also the concept of clinic management. Targeting and positioning become the 기준 for every decision. However, before deciding on that, I plan to talk about what mindset one should have when preparing to open a practice.

An hour is short, but I hope I can meet doctors preparing to open small neighborhood clinics in various places and through various topics.