On Branding
I used to cringe when the topic of branding came up. I thought it was something to file under the heading of “capitalist crap I don’t want to do” and also “something my small business doesn’t have time for”. Over the years my perspective has shifted a lot, and now I think of branding as complex and interesting — and worth digging into, especially now that WCA is focusing on outreach to other organizations. And I imagine some POCA Tech students (and maybe WCA acupuncturists) are having the same kind of flinchy response that I used to.
Not all POCA Tech students, though; some of them are way ahead of me. Noni of Cohort 8, who organized the 5NP pop-up at the Capitol Building, came to a class of first year students to unpack why this particular bit of outreach went so well. Noni said, “Offering 5NP to legislators is a branding exercise. Why would we just ask them for things when we have something we could GIVE them?”
Oh, if only more acupuncturists thought like that.
Lucy Werner, who wrote a DIY guide to branding for small business people, said that your brand is what people remember about you. I think that’s an especially important definition for acupuncturists. Since acupuncture is unfamiliar to most people, word of mouth is crucial. WCA is fortunate to have almost all of our marketing happen through word of mouth; we get reliably delightful patients that way, with a side benefit of having our supporters provide education about acupuncture to the general public. Identifying what we want people to remember about community acupuncture — and then tell their friends about it — is a way of working on our brand.
And every so often, we get feedback about it from unexpected places. Like this newspaper article from November 2022 about 8 things the writer would rather spend $20 a month on than being verified on Twitter:
Seeing acupuncture on a list with moisturizer, books and Candy Crush made my day (though I’m sure some other acupuncturists weren’t as happy). Because those are accessible things that people like. If WCA’s brand is “you sit in a calm dark room with other people and feel good afterward” according to The Oregonian, I’m delighted. That’s about as low-barrier as it gets. Tell the world, please!
Last weekend I had a conversation with Cohort 9 about why WCA doesn’t bill insurance (here’s the Intro, Part One, and Part Two). We talked a lot about the impact that insurance billing would have on WCA’s word of mouth marketing and its brand — wreckage as far as the eye can see, basically. Insurance companies aren’t set up for people who just want to sit in a calm dark room and feel good afterward.
One of the students, who had a prior career as a florist in Las Vegas, offered an illuminating example about how branding works. She said that all her florist competitors made a point of investing in fancy cars, so that when they delivered their flowers to wealthy clients they could pull up in something shiny. She didn’t have a fancy car; in fact sometimes she couldn’t park in her clients’ beautiful driveways for fear of leaking oil on them. She used to worry about the impression she made with her beat-up car until she realized that it differentiated her from the competition. Her flowers were great; her car, not so much — and people remembered that about her. Furthermore, in a counter-intuitive way, her beat-up car built trust with her clients —because it communicated authenticity. She was being herself.
I’d never thought about how much heavy lifting, in terms of branding, WCA’s second hand recliners are doing for us. Big corporations spend millions of dollars to differentiate themselves from the competition and build trust with their customers. Our beat-up recliners do it for free!
Returning to Noni’s point about using 5NP as a branding exercise, I think acupuncturists who are opposed to 5NP laws don’t realize how impactful it can be to just give people something that makes them feel better, without requiring them to do anything or prove anything or jump through any hoops. That’s memorable, that’s distinctive — and it creates an opportunity for trust to grow.
Last week the New York Times ran an article about the band Gossip with a quote that struck me:
It’s possible that there are better people to dig you out of an ice storm than the frontwoman of a dance-punk act, but few would do it as resourcefully or cheerfully as Beth Ditto. Since her band Gossip started 25 years ago, its scrappy, D.I.Y. roots have always run strong. …“I think sometimes just existing is so hard for people — all kinds of people,” she said, herself included. “And so sometimes just writing a song about absolutely [expletive] nothing is such an act of freedom.”
Community acupuncture, whether it’s 5NP or WCA’s version, recognizes that for all kinds of people, just existing is hard — so we set up our systems to not make it any harder. We try to ask as little as possible from patients. That’s what we want them to remember about us: that we get it, we know, and we’re resourcefully and cheerfully trying to help. If there’s anything else we can do to make just existing a little easier, then we want to do that too! Like, how about a 5NP law for Oregon?