What has the marketing of Apple Computers got to do with marketing chiropractic? In recent years Apple has regained it’s marketing edge, which has led to strong sales and a very robust growth in its share price. Maybe there is a valid message in this experience for our profession.
I have gone back 15 years and found an interview between Dominique Jackson and Apple’s product marketing vice president Phil Schiller, which was published in the “Australian” on 19th January 1999. I have drawn certain points and parallels to the chiropractic story and have highlighted the quoted conversation in Italics.
WHAT is Apple’s key message for 1999 and what product will Apple be promoting most heavily?
Certainly our key over-arching message is “Think Different”.
What we’re trying to do is very simple: make the world’s best personal computer.
Apple invented the personal computer, but along the way it got lost and split itself up over so many different things.
It wasn’t making the world’s best computers any more, and it was beginning to lose some customers because of that.
We need to refocus the whole company and start delivering that again.
That’s what we think we’re doing now: making very exciting very innovative products, challenging the computer industry to do new, exciting and different things.
Where has Chiropractic split itself up over so many different things?
Chiropractic is the discoverer and developer of a unique systems approach to health. We are not “complimentary medicine” or “alternative medicine”. We have the vision, the knowledge and the skills to be the world’s best “health care” discipline.
In the last few years or so we have reduced our sights and with it our service and services. We got lost and split ourselves up over so many different things.
We have succumbed to a reductionistic model of segmentalising our approach, hence chiropractic for back pain, chiropractic for headaches etc. Large numbers of our profession have refused to move beyond a mechanistic approach.
Now, the average chiropractor is seeing significantly fewer people than they were 15 years ago.
