Join the Billion Dollar Wellness Revolution

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

Marketing materials sent to chiropractors by mail, fax, and e-mail continue to show up in my chiropractic office (and thousands of other chiropractic offices across North America). There appears to be a new trend in marketing materials arriving the past two months. Gone are the direct-mail campaigns for nonsurgical spinal decompression with offers to fly myself and my family to Hawaii or Florida to attend a sales presentation.

Now that chiropractors decompression units are appearing for sale on auction web sites and our chiropracticclassifieds pages, it’s becoming clear that those marketing to chiropractic offices have moved on from pushing decompression therapies and are now in the business of selling wellness.

So while various spam e-mails targeted at chiropractors continue to appear in our PC inboxes (woo hoo, the rate is going down) direct-mail pieces seem to predominately be focused on selling chiropractors on wellness based marketing tactics. I came home from BarCamp San Diego today to find a direct mail piece sent from a chiropractic marketing company in Florida that boldly states How to attract more women into your practice!

I did some research online to check what kind of terms were coming up when someone did a search for “wellness” with the image to the left showing the top eight results.

Turns out wellness is a brand of dog and cat food. Good to see people are also searching for “health and wellness” and other wellness related searches.

I wasn’t too impressed by the numbers and it has me thinking that perhaps people are searching for something else besides the general term.

Not to worry though, looks like 2008 is going to be a summer of marketing wellness to chiropractors, just like the summer of 2006 was for marketing spinal depression.

Do you want to put all your chiropractic marketing dollars in the wellness basket (so you can attract more women into your practice)? What about chiropractors that adjust children or focus on pediatrics? Is that wellness? How about those focused on sports performance, is that wellness based or injury based? Then there’s the manipulators, marketing manipulation under anesthesia, is that therapeutics or wellness? One thing is for sure, I’ve received no direct-mail, unsolicited e-mail, or faxes sent to my office, by people marketing the correction of vertebral subluxation as something chiropractors could be doing in their practice.

I’m looking forward to see what direct-mail marketing pieces I receive next, not. Hold the presses, I was about to close this post when I noticed another piece of mail from a different chiropractic marketing company based in Tustin, California. Maybe wellness isn’t the only thing we will be reading about, as the piece of mail talks about a recession in the United States.

Wellness Revolution or 2008 Recession, which topic do you think is going to be focused on more in materials being marketed to chiropractors this summer?