Every year around November the world seems to slip into a frenzy of flashing banners, countdown timers and slashed prices. You can almost feel the rush of it in the air, like standing at the edge of a busy high street as people move fast with bags in hand. Black Friday works brilliantly for product companies and there’s a good reason for that. They can manufacture stock all year long, smooth out their production and hold onto that stock until the big day. When their fixed costs are already covered and they understand their margins down to the penny, dropping the sales price still keeps them safely in profit.

Imagine a chocolate maker hand crafting bars in February, March and June, stacking them neatly on shelves to be unwrapped in November. They can make thousands in advance. The magic is in the volume. They don’t need to sell those bars at a premium – they just need to sell a lot of them.

Now let’s look at dentistry. There’s no shelf in the back where you can store a hundred cleans and twenty crowns ready to be sold at a discount. Dentistry is a service which means the “production” and the “consumption” happen at the exact same moment. A dentist provides the care and the patient receives it in the same instant. There’s no separation, no stockpile, no warehouse.

It’s more like attending a 1-2-1 dance class. The teacher can only teach that hour once. The student can only learn in that same hour. There’s no way to bottle that 1-2-1 lesson and sell it in bulk later.

Because of that, dentistry simply doesn’t behave like a product business. It can’t. There are no low-cost quiet months where you keep producing fillings and whitening treatments just to store them up for Black Friday. And if you try to apply product-based logic to a service-based profession, the cracks show quickly.

But there’s a deeper, more human reason too.

Even though patients won’t sit there consciously thinking about economic models or value chains, they will sense something. When a dental practice pushes out Black Friday offers, it quietly tells people “this is just another commodity”. A commodity is something you shop for the way you’d shop for toilet roll or teabags – you find the cheapest and move on.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth. If a practice isn’t the cheapest, that kind of offer trains the patient to go somewhere else. It signals that the practice believes what it provides is interchangeable, repeatable, available anywhere.

That completely undermines what real dentistry is about.

Your mission is rooted in something far more meaningful – the belief that marketing, and by extension dentistry, is about connection. It’s about helping one person find the answer they’ve been searching for. It’s about acting with honesty, transparency and integrity. It’s about creating a win for the patient, a win for the practice and a win for the wider community.

Discount culture erodes that. When healthcare becomes a race to the bottom, everyone loses. The craft of dentistry, the skill of the clinician, the individuality of the patient, the trust between the two – all of it gets flattened into one cold number on a price tag.

Patients don’t choose a dentist because they’re fifty pounds cheaper on a Friday in November. They choose a dentist because they feel understood. They choose a dentist because they want someone who stands for something, someone who is driven by care rather than clicks, someone whose values show up in every interaction.

And when you stay true to that, something interesting happens. Patients feel it. They might not be able to explain it, but they know when a practice isn’t just trying to shift “units”. They know when the care is thoughtful, when the culture is warm, when the experience feels human. They know when they’re not being treated like a commodity.

Black Friday belongs to warehouses and factories. Dentistry belongs to real people sitting in real rooms having real conversations about their health, their confidence and their future.

If you want your practice to grow, focus on clarity, compassion and consistency – not coupons. Shape your marketing around who you are, not what the market is doing. Let your values drive your visibility, because that’s what creates loyalty, trust and genuine growth.

And maybe this November, instead of wondering what discount to offer, ask yourself a different question. What could your practice become if every decision were rooted in meaning rather than margin?

That’s the future patients are looking for.