The aesthetics industry has just inherited a patient it was never designed for

Around two thirds of people walking into a clinic after GLP-1 therapy were not aesthetics users before. (McKinsey, December 2024)

Read that as a commercial fact, not a clinical one.

Everything this industry has built assumes the opposite person. Loyalty programmes assume a second visit. Injector training assumes a patient who knows what a unit is. Pricing assumes a treatment plan, not a first decision.

Our entire acquisition model was designed for someone who decided, years ago, that this was for her.

This patient decided no such thing. She decided to lose weight. The face was a consequence, and the clinic is where she ended up.

→ She arrives without vocabulary. She cannot tell you what she wants, only what she sees.

→ She arrives with a medical story that started somewhere else, with a doctor who never mentioned us.

→ She arrives sceptical, because the last thing that changed her body came with a prescription and side effects nobody explained either.

Three consequences most commercial plans have not absorbed:

1. The first consultation stops being a sales conversation and becomes an education one. That changes chair time — and chair time is the clinic’s real P&L.

2. The referral source moves upstream. The relationship that matters is no longer with the patient. It is with the physician who wrote the prescription.

3. Whoever writes the protocol for this patient defines the category for the next ten years.

Nobody owns this yet. Not pharma, not aesthetics, not the dermocosmetic houses, not nutrition. Each owns a quarter of the answer and none of them owns her.

I have carried a P&L on three of those four sides. It has been the same patient every time. It has never been the same company.

Who gets there first — pharma or aesthetics?

#MedicalAesthetics #GLP1 #Dermatology #CommercialStrategy