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Orthodontic Innovation

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The most innovative thing I have ever led was the launch of a brand that allowed my business to take significant share in the mature orthodontic market, a market that in 2013 had not seen a meaningful share shift for over a decade. Uniquely, the innovation was not a product innovation or a business model disruptor alone, but something less tangible and difficult to achieve, a message innovation that led to a fundamental evolution in customer perception of our company.

Early in 2013, I was leading marketing and product development for the market-leading provider of braces to orthodontists. The product was seemingly unsexy to me, but my customers were passionate about the product category and the associated technique required for using a …show more content…

Our market was flat in North America and growing 2% globally. In response to the targets, I heard several opinions that week from my team, but mostly I heard “It’s an impossible target.” Knowing that we needed to take share in the market to achieve 7% growth, I suggested to my team that we talk to Orthodontists about how we could serve them better and grow as a result. Furthermore I suggested we start with Orthodontists that were not currently purchasing from us, our non-customers. What we heard from our non-customers was initially disheartening. We heard that they knew we had a better product, but that they would never switch to us because they were not in “our camp” and rejected the clinical technique associated with our braces. I quickly learned that Orthodontists are loyal to the companies that make braces, like they are towards professional sports teams, with deep emotional loyalty to a particular business. This feverish passion surrounding which brand of braces an orthodontist used was driven by a deep connection to the technique required to use the braces. Orthodontists told my team and I that braces are the tools of their craft, and how braces perform in their hands has a direct influence on the art they create. They believed that with a different set of braces and a different technique they become different artists, a deeply personal …show more content…

We needed to help our non-customers believe and feel that they were not giving up their personal artistry by switching braces and switching technique. I led the team through a deep dive to dissect the problem down each component in order to understand how we could advance. A key conclusion from the deep dive was that changing technique had an incredibly high switching cost. Not just a financial cost to the orthodontist but also a social and emotional cost that was extraordinary in its impact. In many cases switching technique meant being ostracized by your circle of friends and colleagues associated with your original technique, a devastating consequence to the highly social orthodontist. As we continued our dissection of the problem further we asked the fundamental question, what is technique? We concluded that at its essence, technique was just a series of physical steps that were applied according to a set of principles. We discovered that in actuality the physical steps were applied inconsistently by orthodontists and this resulted in highly variable results for patients. I soon concluded that not only was “technique” a barrier to our business growth, but it was a barrier to patients getting excellent results from their orthodontist! I now understood our path forward. We would eliminate technique from orthodontics completely and thus remove the financial, educational and emotional barriers to switching

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