How many ways are there for us dentists to announce ourselves? We can take out Yellow Page ads, commission radio spots, print office brochures, or build websites. We can put up signs, even billboards. I saw once a dentist’s name cut into the hedge in front of his office.

Perhaps the most ubiquitous piece of personal promotion is the simple business card. More than a listing of basic facts about your service, the business card is a subtle, portable projection of your professional personality. It may require a poet’s skill in delivering maximum information in minimum space. A business card is such a metaphor for effective summary that theater producer David Belasco once told an aspiring playwright, "Look, if you can’t write you idea on the back of my business card, you don’t have a clear idea."

The business card is a subtle, low profile tool. "In these times of insistent advertisement," write the editors of Victoria Business and Calling Card Design, "the gracious reserve of a simple calling card is a gentle reminder of one’s presence." Sometimes a devastatingly gentle reminder, at that. My wife Tonka tells our kids how her mother, Rose, came looking for her one night at a party she wasn’t supposed to be attending. Instead of confronting her disobedient teenage daughter, Rose simply tucked her business card under the windshield wiper of Tonka’s car.

The business card concept dates back to the 1700s. Calling cards, the ancestors of both business cards and greeting cards, were originally a French custom. By the end of the eighteenth century, they were enthusiastically exchanged in the rest of Europe and America as well. Middle- and upper-class visitors dropped their personal calling cards into outstretched palms and silver trays as a salutation. Hopeful young men handed out calling-card variations, called acquaintance cards, as an invitation to attractive women at church or dances. (The cards carried imprinted messages, ranging from "May I see you home?" to brazen requests for a kiss. If a woman wanted to encourage a man, she would keep his card.)

Trade cards, the commercial equivalent, blared advertisements. H.A. Robinson, DDS of Foxcroft, Maine, for example, had 3x5-inch trade cards printed in January 1868 to educate his potential patients. "Dr. R.," the copy reads, "has had a thorough professional education, being a GRADUATE OF THE PHILADELPHIA DENTAL COLLEGE, receiving a diploma with the degree of D.D.S. (Doctor of Dental Surgery,) and he has had six years of constant professional practice." On the reverse, Dr. Robinson warns of traveling quacks, and that physicians are not skillful at extractions: "go to the DENTIST." Toothache, the card notes, "can frequently be cured by the Dentist, without EXTRACTION."

Just as in the past, swapping business cards still amounts to a kind of social contract. Boston consultant Karen Hinds writes on her website, "When you give, or take, a business card, you are really telling that person that you are interested in staying in touch with the hope that resources can be shared or business contracted at some point." In The Pursuit of Wow: Every Person’s Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times, Tom Peters recommends the advice of Harvard marketing guru Ted Levitt: If your product is tangible, distinguish yourself by emphasizing intangibles (read: service). If your product is intangible—that is, a service, such as dental care—distinguish yourself by emphasizing the tangible, namely, design. Present your patients with clean offices, easy-to-use forms—and attention-grabbing business cards. Peters’s hint for the independent businessperson: "You can’t spend too much on calling-card design."

There’s a practical reason for dealing out eye-catching cards: Ninety-eight percent of business cards are tossed out within thirty days. So determined dentists can set themselves apart with four-color business cards, photo business cards, and even wallet-size CD business cards that can store fifty megabytes of data, sound and graphics for a complete audio-visual presentation. And business cards aren’t just for the doctor. Hygienists, assistants, and front-desk personnel—the ambassadors of first impressions, as San Francisco business-communications speaker Donna Olson calls them—should also have their own cards.

Effective business cards inform, persuade, and entertain. And they’re easier to carry than hedge clippers.

From Inscriptions, Journal of the Arizona Dental Association, 15(12):4, June 2001.  Dr. Eric Curtis is author of Hand to Mouth: Essays on the Art of Dentistry, Quintessence, 2002.

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