Dr. Kelly Alhooie uses the cultural phenomenon of the Barbie movie as a case study in marketing: she notes the film's heavy branding (pink color palette, repetition of the name, product placement) and attributes its financial success to strong marketing rather than perceived artistic quality. She then maps these lessons to pelvic health practice growth—arguing that clear, hyped messaging and niching attract patients more than being a technically perfect clinician, and that most clinicians already have the orthopedic skills to treat the majority of pelvic diagnoses. The episode closes with a coaching-style call to action to clarify marketing messages or book a consult.
Welcome to Pelly biz podcast. I'm Dr. Kelly Alhui. I've grown my pelvic health practice, orthopelvic physical therapy, and now I'm helping pelvic health professionals do the same. Each week, I give you the knowledge you need to grow your practice. Let's get into today's episode.
I'm going to be talking about what the Barbie movement has taught me. Number one, that marketing agency that put together a campaign. I think they spent over. And I don't quote me on this, but I think they spent over $400 million on marketing and a crazy, crazy number on marketing. However, I actually did go see this movie. Now, I have not been to a movie theater, literally, since Legally Blonde came out. I don't know how old I was. It was forever ago. And then we just went. We saw it, and it taught me, like, such an amazing lesson. And this morning I saw a headline saying, the first ever female director to make a billion dollars on her directing this movie. She's so. She's made over a billion dollars on this Barbie movie. And I'm thinking. And I just got that headline. I'm thinking, that movie was the weirdest, craziest. I feel like people must have been on crack when they made it. I don't know. For those who love seeing the Barbie movie, I don't know, it was about, I guess, feminism, but, like, promoting women, which clearly I'm all about. Okay, 100% support that. So I'm glad there's a movie on it. But I. They said in the movie Barbie 20,000 times, which makes you keep remembering Barbie. So I think there was such a psychology standpoint. I. They kept saying Barbie, Barbie, Ken, Ken, Ken. That's all the words that they said. Like, throughout the whole movie, they kept showing a Chevy car and how amazing this car was racing these to get away. And the angles that they were shooting the Chevy car, you could tell that they were just promoting the Chevy car and clearly getting a kickback from Chevy. Um, so I just thought it was the weirdest a. It was the weirdest movie. It reminds me that I absolutely hate watching movies. But I think there was a lesson, I guess, like, females are cool and we can all help empower each other, which I absolutely love that. But I think the real message here that I'm trying to convey to you guys is it doesn't matter how good you are. Doesn't matter. This movie, to me sucks compared to all the movies I've seen in the past. Okay? But what I can tell You So, like, why did they make a billion dollars? Plus, because they were good at marketing. They knew how to market. They knew the message that it takes to get the Barbie movement out there. Everything was coded in pink. So the first thing to this was, you know, everything is pink, pink, pink. So that's a brand new move. Just a color, just branding colors. I don't know if you guys have that, but if you don't, specifically branding colors now, some people go crazy over it. Put their whole Instagram grid and make it just that color. I kind of am not that person because I think it just becomes kind of like background noise. Like, we've seen the color a billion times, so now we don't pay attention. So I like to just make my Instagram grid messy. Some of you might think that that is absolutely ridiculous and you want to brand the crap out of yourself and you want to make it have a really cute Instagram grid. Great, do that. You know, to each his own. And it's going to attract a different buyer. Right? So I think, you know, they had that, the Barbie house, they had the Barbie nail polish, they had the Barbie towels. I mean, Barbie, Barbie, Barbies fricking everywhere. So good job on the marketing company that I don't know who they are. I should find out who actually put off this campaign, because they're going to be very, very rich. But it was just fascinating to me that you could have such a sucky product. Like, really, movie was not good. You could have such a sucky product and you could be making a billion dollars. So anyways, my point is this to everyone, okay? How does this apply to us pelvic health therapists? And why am I making a podcast on it? It applies to us because in the pelvic health world, there's many people that have imposter syndrome, and the imposter syndrome is you don't think that you're good enough to treat someone's condition. The reality is, Most of us, 95% of us, come out with a very strong orthopedic background at a PT school. And all we have to do is use the orthopedic background and then sprinkle in a little pelvic health to combine all the systems together and. And be able to treat at least 90% of the diagnoses walking in that door. Now, you may struggle a little bit with males. If you never treated a male, you may struggle a little bit with the tailbone pain. I get it. Um, but other than that, you really should maybe put dental neuralgia Might be something, you know, it's a little scary, but other than that, it's really kind of the basic stuff. You gotta decompress the tissue, you gotta, you know, basically decrease the inflammation, calm the nervous system. Then you have to re educate because you have to lengthen first. Then you have to re educate the muscle on how to fire, when to fire, and then you get them to return back to the activity. That's literally what you can do in every diagnosis. So if you know how to talk to people, it doesn't matter how many Con ed courses you've had, doesn't matter how good you are. If you're able to communicate that you can help someone and that this is going to be for you and hype it up, like really hype it. Because that's what Barbie did. Barbie really hyped the movement. They really got the messaging out there. If you're able to get the messaging out there that you are the go to HIP PT or OT or pta, they're going to actually start sending to you and you're going to see your company grow. If it's really hard for you to get the message out there, but you're an amazing clinician, you're going to help some such a smaller amount of people than if you were to know how to actually market. Marketing is so huge when it comes to messaging. So here's my question to you guys. Are you really clear on the marketing message that you are putting out there? What do you stand for? Are you basically saying, hey, I help treat tailbone pain, postpartum moms, leakage pain with intercourse, hip pain, low back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, you are one of those people, then it's going to be very difficult for you to actually get clients. So that is something that we've got to niche down. If you have trouble with that, please let me know. I'd be more than happy to help you with that. But that is something that you've got to get narrowed down and very clear on who you help so that you can actually attract the right people and, and be like the Barbie movie and be massively successful like that. That's the only way that they've been able to be massively successful. Because I can tell you right now, their movie 100% did not tell itself. Definitely was not the case. So like I said, if you think, hey, I got to be the best clinician, I got to be the best clinician to have an amazing clinic, that's just not true. The reality is what you actually know Right now, you can literally help and start Today at least 95% of the patients that walk through your door. So just a little lesson that I wanted to come on and talk to you guys about about imposter syndrome, that it's okay to learn as you basically are treating these patients, learn from the patients. To me, that's where you're going to get the most amount of knowledge compared to reading a research article, really just putting in the work, doing the reps over and over again. Your patients are going to teach you how to actually be more confident and truly understand how to treat their diagnoses and communicate better to that. And if you're struggling with communication, and what I mean by that is if you don't know how to get the user that you are trying to attract to get them to see that you are the one that can actually help them, then reach out to me. Because that is something that if you don't have dialed in, it's going to be very hard for you to get the buyers that you're actually looking for.
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