Persuasive Techniques Applied to Dental Advertising

Behaviour Change Techniques to Help Dental Practice Acquire New Patients

Edited: This project is written by Alex Aldridge- u1703902
The Problem

Dentists work hard. We all know that. To become a dentist in the UK requires a rigorous & competitive 5 years in dental school. Dentists then spend their waking hours looking inside people’s mouth, performing risky surgical procedures, as well as having to complete continuing professional development through their career.

It’s even harder to run a private practice. Having to hire staff and keep your customers & landlord happy. Life can be stressful for your average private dentist.

With my project, I hope to alleviate some of these problems for a dentist from my local area, who is a family friend. As a member of the social media age, I was asked to help promote their practice on Facebook by running promotions on Facebook. I immediately thought of how I could utilise the behaviour change techniques I have learnt from this module, to help with this and get more patients into their practice. Hopefully, this will help to alleviate some financial stress from the business.

Although this project lacks the macroscopic aspirations of some of the other projects, I hope this will have a meaningful & positive effect on this dentist’s life. This project will be especially interesting due to the extensive ability to analyse the results & come to conclusions regarding the effectiveness of behaviour change techniques applied to this particular setting.

The other ambition of this project is to help dental practices across the UK to understand how to best market their practice, using proper persuasion techniques. Across the world, the Brits have been given the unfortunate reputation of having terrible teeth. For example, in one episode of the Simpsons, Ralph Wiggum is terrified into brushing his teeth by showing him a horrifying editorial named ‘The Big Book of British Smiles’ featuring Sherlock Holmes and Prince Charles.

Although this reputation is quite undeserved (American children were found to have on average double the number of decayed teeth as British children (OECD, 2008)) there is still work to be done. Only 44.3% of Londoners were found to have visited the dentist in the last 24 months (NHS Digital, 2018.)

These findings applied on a macro scale, could have a positive effect on the adoption of positive dental hygiene. As more people are persuaded to visit dentists & build long term relationships. They could be educated on the importance of visiting the dentist every 6 months as advised & this could have a significant effect on dental hygiene.

The Intervention

My project is set up as a controlled field experiment. It will investigate how the introduction of scarcity into a promotional advertisement for a dentist affects the take-up of the offer. The offer is a 50% off deal on teeth whitening, which is a popular treatment that dentists use to get more patients into the practice and hopefully build a relationship.

The ad will target 25-55 year olds within 5 miles of the practice. Everyone needs a dentist so there is no use of the more advanced Facebook targeting techniques e.g. behavioural interests like hobbies.

To conduct this experiment, we will utilise two advertisements. One control ad that doesn’t include any statements of scarcity, and another that uses a form of demand scarcity, where we are limiting the deal only to the next 5 takers. This statement is included in the first line, ‘above the fold’ to ensure that prospects see it. Other than this statement, the ads will be identical, as shown here:

And here below, I show the ad:

Our biggest offer yet!

Unlike our other plans, with this instant whitening treatment, you will notice the difference straight away as you brighten up the room with your new smile!

“My teeth get complimented ALL the time now. Not only am I extremely happy with the results but the staff couldn’t have been any nicer or more helpful”

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

With this deal, you will also get a complimentary home whitening kit to maintain your new bright smile for up to 3 years

Click the ‘Get Offer’ button below to fill out your details to get your 50% off.

Cherrytree Dental Care is located at 93 Robin Hood Way, London, SW15 3QE. A short trip from Putney or Kingston

Our professional and welcoming team of trained dentists will make sure you have an amazing experience.

Psychological and persuasion techniques Used in the Project

The Elaboration-Likelihood model put forward by Petty & Cacioppo (1979) suggests that we process information differently, depending on the importance of the issue. They propose two pathways, a central path where systematic processing is used, this is logical & effortful processing of information. This is used for decisions that are large in scale or risky. On the other hand, the peripheral path uses heuristic processing, with the use of shortcuts & simple cues to make decisions. This is used for smaller and less important decision.

It is unclear which pathway prospects would use when deciding whether to respond to this advertisement. Although teeth whitening could be considered an emotional & luxury purchase, they are also quite expensive (over £100.) Taking up the deal is also a show of confidence in the dentist and could result in a long-term relationship with them. Therefore, I assume that prospects are more likely to use systematic processing. Therefore, I made sure to include extensive detail in the ad, stating that ‘Cherrytree Dental Care is located at 93 Robin Hood Way, London, SW15 3QE. A short trip from Putney or Kingston’ & ‘Our professional and welcoming team of trained dentists will make sure you have an amazing experience.’ This elaboration would be more persuasive to the central decision-making pathway. This style of copy is uncommon, where shorter copy is often used to maintain interest & curiosity.

The Yale Attitude Change Approach (Hovland, 1953) states that persuasion is influenced by 3 factors: The source, the message & the audience. I will now identify & analyse the other factors that could make this advertisement persuasive.

Firstly, the source of this ad is clearly credible, as a long-standing dental practice in the target audience’s area. It is possible that the audience wouldn’t have heard of them before, however curious prospects could easily go to their Facebook page & website and prove that this is a credible source.

The role of a dentist comes with much authority as trust is put into expert medical practitioners. People rely on their opinions, without much justification necessary.  Authority is one of Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion.  It was found in Hovland & Weiss(1951) that students who read an article arguing the safety of nuclear submarines, were more likely to agree if the author was well known nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer compared to when the same article was attributed to PRAVDA, a Soviet news agency.

The picture used of the smartly dressed and young women was used to evoke a feeling of similarity within the prospect. This person shown is supposed to represent our target prospect. The happiness of the women might appeal to people who want to be feel similarly and therefore engage with our ad.

It has also been shown that the concreteness of the words we use has been increasing over time (Hills & Adelman, 2015.) I made sure to make my statements as concrete as possible, talking about the prospect’s ‘smile’ and ‘home teeth whitening kit.’ Concrete words are more easily recalled (Miller & Roodenrys, 2009) and was found to be more powerful & easier to understand (Sadoski, 2001.)

Social proof was also utilised to evoke further credibility. This was done by using the real quote from a patient at the clinic, describing her experience with the teeth whitening. I also use the phrase ‘our most popular treatment’ to show that there is high demand for the treatment. According to social monitoring theory, we feel uncomfortable when we think differently from the group in fear of rejection. In fact, in Asch 1955, it was found that many people will publicly reject their held beliefs if confronted by a group that have a different opinion. Therefore, the social proof gives the prospect reassurance that this is a valuable treatment and make the prospect feel more comfortable in taking up the offer.

Another important principle of persuasion, as stated by Cialdini, is consistency. It has been found that the more a prospect sees an ad, the more familiar they become with the business & therefore are more inclined to liking it (Fang, 2007.) This is supported by Peskin & Newell (2002) who found that we favour faces that we are exposed to more frequently. The ad was shown to prospects multiple times by Facebook, as measured by the frequency of the ad (how many times the ad was seen by the average prospect.) There is a balance here to be maintained, between wasting money showing ads to prospects who have not shown interest in the offer previously & building consistency and familiarity. Common advertising practice is to keep the frequency below 2, so that the average prospect may not see the same ad twice.

And finally, we will discuss the subject of this investigation. Scarcity serves a heuristic, where we place value on an item based on how easily we might lose it, especially to competitors. There are two main types of scarcity, quantity & time. I decided to use the quantity variation, where there is a limited amount of the offer. This is to add an extra element of social proof, as prospects could infer that there is high demand for the product. This scarcity was real as we decided to take down the ad if we reached the threshold, to maintain credibility & trust with the practice & their patients.

A meta-analysis by Lynn (1991) showed that the enhancement of value through scarcity was robust, in most studies, even if the effect was small. This effect was particularly pronounced in high price & motivation conditions. This heuristic is supported by Simonson (1992) which found that in a time limited position, prospects will be more likely to prefer higher-priced but well-known brands, over a lesser known, but higher quality brand. This suggests that when given less time for processing, prospects will resort to heuristics and less accurate processing. In his seminal paper, Cialdini (1993) showed anecdotal evidence that car & real estate salesman were successful in using scarcity to motivate potential buyers into accepting a higher price, by suggesting that other prospects were willing to purchase in the upcoming days.

Ethics

There were several ethical issues to be accounted for with this project. Firstly, it was important to not knowingly waste the dentist’s money by running a control ad that I hypothesised to be less successful. To combat this, I limited the budget for these advertisements to £35 each across seven days. This issue is also diminished by the utilisation of various other persuasive techniques in both ads, as I will discuss. Advertising often utilises tests like this to determine the importance of various factors of an ad. Therefore, this experiment also served to the benefit of the dentist in understanding better the importance of scarcity in their advertisements.

Secondly, it is important to handle personal data correctly. The advertisement prompts prospects to fill out their details in order to be contacted back by the reception team at the practice. This data includes names, email addresses & phone numbers. To handle this issue, this personal data was not seen by me and sent straight to the reception team using automation software, there will also be no use of this data in this report. The relevant metric I will be using to operationalize the effectiveness of each ad is the cost per lead (the average money spent for getting a lead from each ad.) As no third parties (including me) will observe this personal data, we maintain the ethical standards set up by the University Research Ethics Committee, as well as following GDPR standards, especially applied to medical information.

The use of cost per lead could be considered a sub-par metric for an ad, considering that this does not necessarily relate to who goes on to buy treatments. However, with the conversion tracking available to me, this is the best possible solution. Cost per lead is recognised as a worthwhile metric in advertising that heavily relates to spending.

Results:

In the table below, I show the results of this field experiment

As we can see, there was a clear difference in cost per lead between the two ads. This suggest that the inclusion of scarcity was highly influential in increasing urgency & the value of the product in the prospect's eyes.

Conclusions & Limitations:

In conclusion, this experiment suggests that scarcity was highly influential in helping the dentist to attract patients into their practice. The use of scarcity seemed to increase the value of the offer in the mind of the prospect, as well as increasing the urgency of the prospect in responding.

These findings have wide-ranging applications, suggesting an effective method for dentists to attract patients.  In further research, it would be interesting to see if this result will hold with a larger sample size as the differences could be due to statistical variance.

This experiment has several reliability  issues. Firstly, the Facebook algorithm is trained to show ads to people who are most likely to respond. Therefore, it is likely that these ads were shown to different prospects with differing levels of motivation. Also, there was a minor difference in frequency, suggesting that more prospects were shown the ad with scarcity, potentially affecting results.

With the resources available, I am satisfied with the reliability & replicability of these results, considering they conform to previous behaviour change theory. Further research into different persuasion techniques and their application in this setting would be interesting and something I would like to see in the future.

References

Asch (1955). Opinions and Social Pressure, Scientific American 450.

Cialdini, Goldstein (2002). The Science and Practice of Persuasion, Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Volume: 43 issue: 2, page(s): 40-50.

Hills, Adelman (2015). Recent evolution of learnability in American English from 1800 to 2000, International Journal of Cognitive Science.

Hovland, Weiss (1951). The Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 15, Issue 4, Pages 635–650.

Hovland, Janis & Kelley (1951).Communication and persuasion; psychological studies of opinion change. Yale University Press.

Lynn (1991). Scarcity effects on desirability: A quantitative review of the commodity theory literature. Psychology & Marketing, 8, 43–57.

Miller, Roodenrys  (2009). The interaction of word frequency and concreteness in immediate serial recall. Memory & Cognition 37, 850–86.

NHS Digital, Adam Langron (2018). Health and Social Care Information Centre, ‘NHS Dental Statistics, England.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (2008) Health data. Tooth decay, 2008.

Peskin & Newell, Familiarity breeds attraction: Effects of exposure on the attractiveness of typical and distinctive faces. Perception. 33. 147-57.

Petty, Cacioppo (1979). Issue involvement can increase or decrease persuasion by enhancing message-relevant cognitive responses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(10).

Sadoski (2001). Resolving the Effects of Concreteness on Interest, Comprehension, and Learning Important Ideas, Educational Psychology Review 13, 263–281.

Simonson (1992). The Influence of Anticipating Regret and Responsibility on Purchase Decisions. Journal of Consumer Research. 19. 105-18.