Last week I talked with a manufacturer’s rep. We hadn’t seen each other in a number of years, so it was nice to catch up on the “personal” stuff. Even so, I did get a chance to ask a few business related questions. One of which was – is business increasing, or not?
He was emphatic in his evaluation of the current upward trend in business. That was good to hear since we have been hearing so many economic disaster stories for the past three years. We like to think of our profession as one that, to some degree, is isolated from the problems our economy has been going through. However, here is one little story to show how the world around us, as unrelated as we think it may be, can affect us.
Las Vegas has been at the epicenter of the housing/financial/jobs crisis for the past several years. Unemployment is pushing 20%. Eighty percent of home owners are “under water” with their mortgages. A few weeks ago, two casinos announced in the same week that they were going to close. The following week, a professional I know in North Las Vegas (a separate city on the north side of Las Vegas) told me that all three fittings he had scheduled for the week after the casinos made their announcements had cancelled. All three patients were retirees and all three cited concerns about the economy as their reason for canceling. Were they looking for a reason not to be fit? Possibly. But more than likely, the perception that times were rough and might be getting even worse had colored their thinking.
You wouldn’t think that a casino closing would affect hearing aid sales. They seem to be two very separate economic activities, but in today’s world, we are all connected. We can’t take what we do as being unaffected by the world around us. This does not mean we should run and hide our heads in the sand, but we do need to be aware of what is going on around us and devise strategies to keep our offices moving forward, no matter what.
For what it’s worth, I saw a similar situation in 2002 but surprisingly, only my upper income patients seemed to exhibit any financial concerns. My lower income retired patients continued making their hearing health decisions with little or no regard for what was happening in the general economy around them. If you have been experiencing the same type of activity, might not targeting your advertising toward your lower-income patients be a strategy worth considering? What do you think?
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