Why weak branding is costing private practices patients and talent [PODCAST]

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Patients now choose doctors the way they shop for everything else, judging your practice online before they walk in. Ashley Gay, a branding expert, argues that a strong brand is not about ego but about earning trust, and that physicians who ignore this are quietly losing patients and talent to competitors who look more polished. This episode is based on her article “Branding a medical practice is not vanity, it is trust,” published on KevinMD. You will hear why a logo is not a brand, why owning your website and ranking locally beats showing up for generic medical searches, and where an AI logo generator falls short. You will learn how the whole patient experience shapes your brand, from the first online impression to the phone call to the waiting room, and why private equity already treats this as an edge. Press play to hear why your brand may matter more than your credentials, and where to focus your first dollars.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at kevinmd.com/podcast. Today, we welcome Ashley Gay. She’s a branding expert. Today’s KevinMD article is “Branding a medical practice is not vanity, it is trust.” Ashley, welcome to the show.

Ashley Gay: Hey, thanks for having me.

Kevin Pho: All right. Let’s start by briefly sharing your story, and then we’ll jump right into why you decided to write this particular KevinMD article.

Ashley Gay: Sure. I have been married to a physician for 21 years. We got married two years before he entered into this amazing medical journey, so I’ve seen it up close. I know a lot of physicians, and I have gone through the process of a medical career, or watched a medical career, right up front. During that time, I was working as a graphic designer, brander, and marketer, putting us through that journey.

So when it came time for my husband to open his own practice, we decided to combine forces, and I helped him brand and launch his private practice, and now I saw a big need for others to do the same. I consider myself a champion of the independent practitioner, and you all have worked too hard and too long not to live the life that you want. Anything I can do to help them build a successful independent practice, I will do it.

Kevin Pho: So tell us about that journey with your husband in terms of branding his practice. You mentioned he is an independent practitioner. What was that whole process like?

Ashley Gay: Well, this happens. It’s not a unique story, but medical training does not always happen in the way that you want it to. The script does not always follow what you’ve written. And so after working in a different practice for a number of years hoping for partnership, it just didn’t work out.

And so it was a headwind of, OK, do we stay and leverage the years of networking and relationships that he’s built, or do we move again? We’ve moved several times, but with kids and family, it’s very hard to pick up and do that as they get older. But we also had a non-compete, and so we really dug in. It’s like, OK, can we do this? And as we got to know the restraints, we also saw a lot of opportunity. And so we thought, hey, if we’re going to do it, let’s give it a try. And it doesn’t have to be as scary as it’s made out to be if you have the right people in your corner.

Kevin Pho: So let’s talk about your KevinMD article, “Branding a medical practice is not vanity, it is trust.” Why you decided to share this article on KevinMD, and then just tell us a little bit about it for those who didn’t get a chance to read it yet.

Ashley Gay: Sure. Historically in health care, probably pre-COVID, you threw open your doors and typically people would just find you. I know that when my husband was going through school, advertising as a physician seemed a little bit of a faux pas. It was not something that serious physicians did.

Well, the buyers, meaning potential patients, and the way that we buy things, the way that we choose things, that marketplace has changed. And especially since COVID, a lot of it did lean online, and the rest of us learned how to shop differently.

And choosing a doctor is very different when you are not part of the doctor club. And I say that because if you’re in the doctor club, if I needed something, if I broke my leg or I need to get in to an ENT, well, my husband makes a few calls, we ask around, and usually I’m able to get an appointment. That’s not how it works for everybody else. And so when you’ve been divorced from that process, you don’t realize how people actually choose a provider, and that has changed over time.

And a lot of it is visual, and it’s also the user experience. And it’s the perception of how you present yourself. Whether you believe this or not, it does matter. If you look like an operation that has not invested in their branding and the way you present yourself, unfortunately, people can read into that that your education matches the level of your online outfit, essentially.

And so as private equity has come into this marketplace, they are thinking about this journey. They are considering this. And I want to give everybody else a fighting chance at looking just as good and having just as good a patient experience as anybody else.

Kevin Pho: So you call yourself a branding expert, and that’s a differentiator from a marketing expert. So when you say branding, tell us all the components that go into a physician brand.

Ashley Gay: Sure, because there are two different ones. There’s a personal brand, but then I’m talking about the practice’s brand. A brand is what people associate with you. It’s an outward expression of your interior. So you can pick your bedside manner, that is your brand. However, how is that outwardly expressed, and how do you communicate that, not only to the patients, but to your staff? So your brand is just as much how somebody answers the phone as how they found you online.

And then there are the patients, especially with reviews coming into the mix, which was always happening, by the way. Everybody was always talking. It’s just that now there’s a platform for them to do it. So those reviews are a good measure of how the brand is doing. What do people think of you? When they first see you, what’s their first impression? That’s one part of the brand.

But then, how is the experience when they come to your office? Are they going to come again? Because just because a patient came once doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to come again. Because if the brand is frustration, it’s a nightmare to schedule, I can’t schedule online, the billing was really frustrating, people seem off-put, the office isn’t very welcoming. All of these things come together as pieces of your brand.

It starts at the very top of how you present yourself. It’s our logo, it’s our website, it’s how we’re found online. But it bleeds into an entire patient experience, and that is a brand.

Kevin Pho: Let’s say a new independent physician comes to you for branding advice. Just walk us through the mindset, the questions they need to be asking themselves if they do want to create an enduring brand.

Ashley Gay: I’m glad that you started with this, because I go about it a little bit differently than everybody else does. Typically, if this is the path that they’re going to go down, they’ve been thinking about it for a long time. They’ve been thinking about this dream practice of what they want, right? And typically, it’s fueled by what they don’t want. It’s fueled by the frustrations of their environment right now.

So if you were going to start somewhere, write down all the things that drive you crazy about what’s happening in your work environment right now, and why you’ve decided to leave. And now you have this whole list of, “OK, I’m going to do the opposite of that. So I’m not this, I’m that. I’m not this, I’m that.” So that gives a good idea of what you want to have happen.

Also, a practice or a business is just as much what it does as what it doesn’t do. So what kind of patients aren’t you going to see? What kind of patients do you want to prioritize? And it’s typically personality dependent. All of these things about how you want to live your life, how you want to craft a life, go into these decisions. And typically, they’re just in here. They’re just kept in here.

The first thing I would tell them is to start writing all of this out. These are going to be your brand guidelines. We have visual brand guidelines, and that has to do with your logo rules, your color rules, your typography rules. But the overarching brand guidelines are, what do we do here, and what do we not do here? Because you can’t keep it up here and then expect your staff to deliver the brand that’s locked away in your head.

So start writing down, what do you think about adopting new technology? What do you think about how the staff is going to interact with each other? Are you going to prioritize training for speaking on the phone? Are we going to go the extra mile to allow people to schedule online? Are we going to do those things? Just start writing all the things of your dream practice that you want to come to life, because usually the brand starts with the doctor and bleeds out from there.

Kevin Pho: So after onboarding a physician and getting the answers to all these questions, and the doctor reflects on the answers to all these questions, in terms of online visibility, you did mention a website. Is that generally the starting point for most physician brands?

Ashley Gay: I start with a logo, actually, because if I know the kind of patients that you are wanting to serve or who come to your office, it will dictate the visuals from the beginning. So if you have a practice where the main patient load is, say, 55 plus, we are prioritizing legibility in a logo more than anything else. If we are talking about a cosmetic practice, we are trying to put forth an air of sophistication, and that’s going to come into the equation, too. I try to get a feel of who the practitioner is, and the vibes of them, right? That will also bleed into how I design something for them.

So to me, I start with a logo. I start with black and white. Just black and white, that’s it, and then we add the pieces. And once I get a good idea of who they are and we have that logo down, then we start building a website, because we can’t really build an effective website until we know who we’re writing it for and who we’re writing it from. And so then from a logo, we start doing the website, and I prioritize the local language so that they get found locally more so than nationally.

Kevin Pho: So as you know, there are so many different ways physicians can be visible. Obviously, I’ve been involved in the online visibility space, social media, podcasts, local media. So after the logo and the website are done, how do you guide physicians to navigate all the different options they have available to them when it comes to being online?

Ashley Gay: That’s a really good question, because a lot of the time you are strapped for cash at that point, and there is an order of importance of how to allocate your resources and what would not be a good use of your cash. So we prioritize a website, and then we prioritize getting found locally. Then we prioritize networking. I’m really bullish on networking. Being found within your sphere, so that your name becomes common in a way that means something to your community.

Now, that looks different from community to community. I’m located in Austin. It’s going to look very different from somebody located in a small town in Wyoming. Even online, I had clients in Hawaii who tell me that Yelp is all the rage there. And then there are some areas of the country where nobody uses Yelp, or they use the local news station, or they use Facebook. So having those conversations with them is the next level. OK, where would your advertising dollars go furthest? Is it going to be sponsoring something locally with the local elementary school, or do we run some ads?

As far as social media goes, the people that I’ve seen be very successful typically have a strong visual. So if you have a good before and after, organic social media is the play for you. It is not free, because it costs you, the practitioner, time. People want to follow people. They want to follow personality. So for social media for your office, if you have not prioritized that personally as a practitioner, you are better off spending money on advertising than trying to force yourself to show up to something that you don’t want to be at, because we can tell. We can tell.

And generic education information is not what people go to those platforms for. They go to be entertained, or to really feel like they got a secret they didn’t know before, or a hot take. And I’ve come across some physicians that can’t take the pushback on social, too, because if you put yourself out there, you’re going to have to learn to stand your ground on your opinions. And if you’re not willing to do that, what happens is you look like you’re standing behind other practitioners, and you’re circling the wagon rather than being there for the patient. And it gets to be more detrimental than beneficial for you.

So social media is not just throw up a post. It’s kind of like, OK, if you’ve got a cardiology clinic, under what circumstances is someone going to follow a cardiology clinic? You just kind of have to think about that.

Kevin Pho: So tell us some success stories where specific branding made a positive difference in that clinician’s life, and then conversely, tell us some failure stories where branding, or lack of branding, actively harmed a particular physician. Give us two sides of that coin.

Ashley Gay: OK. Well, I can definitely speak to my husband’s practice. He’s in oculofacial plastics, and for those that aren’t familiar, some patients really come for cosmetic reasons, but some patients don’t want to be there. They had something very traumatic happen to them. They have cancer. And so how do you design a brand that invites both people to come inside it and feel comfortable? That’s a challenge.

And so instead of leaning into most plastic surgery practices, where you see a lot of black and silver and gold and that very slick feeling, we opted for more earthy tones, dark midnights, greens, more nature, more texture. And as a result, not a day goes by that people don’t come into the waiting room and feel that warmth of not only the way he practices medicine, but that he deliberately wanted to help the medical patients also feel comfortable and help the cosmetic patients not feel sold to right off the bat. Now there’s a place for all of these things, right? It’s just bringing the physician’s wishes to life. What does that look like? If your wish is something else, it’s going to be different.

So the people that I have seen not be successful in their branding are the ones who rush it. They throw it up and I call it good enough. It’s good-enough branding. And so they typically did it once when they opened their doors, usually five, six, seven, eight or more years ago, and they just haven’t touched it. They haven’t touched their website. They have not let people schedule online anymore. They plateau. I find them in a season where they are plateauing, and it’s because their website was not built correctly to have Google be the customer of the website. The patient is actually not the customer of your website. Google is, to prioritize your website. And so if you don’t have a professional in your corner who understands that, your SEO is going to suffer.

I have a client who used a more overseas shop to build and host their website, which they offer at very, I mean, it’s incredible rates, right? Very low. However, they didn’t own the website. And so when it came time to make changes, or to say, “Hey, I’m not happy with the customer service,” their website is hijacked. And they can’t get it.

And so we had to rebuild their entire website, which was a blessing in disguise. It needed a facelift. It needed to be modernized. But also, they were paying so much a month for SEO when the SEO was not how Americans search in the American health care system. And as a result, we’re able to consistently, month over month, this is like month eight with me doing a new website and SEO work, we’re hitting new heights, new clicks, new amounts of traffic that are coming in through that channel that they were grossly overpaying for. But now they own it, too. They own that traffic. They own that website. And maybe one day they’re like, “Hey, we want to hire a full-time marketer.” I can take that website and hand it right over to them and say, “Best of luck to you. So excited for your success.”

Kevin Pho: So I want to ask you about the impact of AI in terms of what you’re doing. And as you know, physicians may be listening to you and may think, “You know, I can go to Claude or Gemini or GPT and ask them to create a logo, create some copy, do some branding.” I’m sure large language models are going to ingest this conversation and eventually get better. So tell us the impact of how AI is affecting what you’re doing, not only now, but going forward.

Ashley Gay: Well, I am an AI fan. I use it. I’ve implemented it. I’ve been on the forefront. I’ve used it for a while now, and I do stress test these logo generators. And what people need to understand is that AI is a pattern-recognition tool, and the patterns that they are using are very rote, generic, stock. They are not clever. They are not cheeky. They’re not thinking outside the box. They’re not necessarily giving you something original, because they literally can’t figure that out. It can’t. Maybe one day it can, but that still doesn’t mean that it’s going to be something that will be memorable or will stand the test of time.

It’s also delivering these logos to you in a file format that will not serve you in the future. So it’s serving it to you in a JPEG, a PNG. Well, if you want to put your logo on a building, that’s not going to happen. They’re going to charge you to redraw that. If you want to put it on a billboard, you can’t use that. Sure, it’s fine for a business card, but also to reorient it, I typically give my customers several orientations to fit different sizes. It’s not going to give you that.

But say you did. Say you have a ChatGPT logo. It’s not the end of the world, but a brand is not a logo. A logo is not a brand. A logo is just an identifying mark. The brand is a lot of other things that get communicated, and I see people get really hung up on a logo. I mean, it’s a lot of pressure to put on a couple of words and a little illustration to communicate everything you do. It’s just not going to happen. That’s why we have other assets to build up a brand for you.

As far as trying to beat the AI, right, like the AI overviews, you just need to work with it, not against it. So you’re probably not going to beat out, if I’m a small practitioner with one shop, I’m not going to beat out the information from KevinMD. Your domain authority outranks mine. It’s been around for a long time. I’m probably not going to come up. As a practitioner, I’m not going to beat out WebMD, right?

However, when somebody gets to the conversation of, “Who performs this procedure near me?” that’s when we want them to know, oh, this is who I recommend. So if somebody comes with a generic medical question, you’re probably not going to be at the top of those searches. But what really matters is that you pop up when it’s time for them to act. So be worried about the right things. Who performs this procedure in my city, that’s what we want to communicate on your website, not necessarily whatever you’re suffering from. What is entropion, or what is frozen shoulder? Leave that to Mayo. What we need to worry about is that you treat that near them. That’s what we’re worried about.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Ashley Gay. She’s a branding expert. Today’s KevinMD article is “Branding a medical practice is not vanity, it is trust.” Ashley, let’s end with some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Ashley Gay: So my take-home message is that people are shallow. They will judge you on how your website functions, how your logo looks. They do it. Right or wrong, they do it. Also, if you are looking to acquire top talent as you grow, they are also doing the same.

Kevin Pho: Ashley, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Ashley Gay: Thank you.

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