We Read 100 Optometry About Pages. Most Never Told Us Their Story.
Qualification reduces risk. It rarely creates preference.
A couple of months ago, on a Zoom call, my friend and advertising colleague Nico Roseillier of UN_TI_TLED and I were talking about business storytelling. Not the laminated kind that ends up on a mission statement, but the working kind that moves markets, the way only two seasoned ad men can talk about it.
During our chat Nico said something I've been turning over ever since.
Go read a practice's About page. You'll know in ninety seconds whether they believe any of this.
I didn't argue with him. I also didn't quite believe him.
So, I went looking. Nothing scientific about it, just a handful of Google searches from my desk in Phoenix and whatever practices came up within driving distance.
Degree. Residency. Affiliations. Instrumentation, listed by manufacturer. The photograph with a spouse, two kids and a golden retriever caught mid-yawn on a suburban lawn.
It read like a CV.
That's the phrase I couldn't shake, because a CV has a job and this isn't it. A CV proves you belong in the exam room. It was never built to make anybody want you there.
Nico was right, and a dozen practices in one metro area is not an argument. So, I widened it...a lot...to 100, across the country, with no state left unexamined.
Somewhere in that hundred, a page in Richmond, Kentucky stopped me. Eye Care Center Optometrist gives its founding a heading of its own: From Battlefield to Clinic. A doctor comes home from World War II and opens a small practice in a town where the profession had little equipment and narrow authority to diagnose anything. What he had instead was a reason to be there.
Six decades later that practice runs six offices across central and eastern Kentucky, and the page is explicit that the expansion was never about growing a business. It was about answering a need. Sixty years, and a straight line from why the first door opened to why the sixth one did. I read it twice, which is not something I do with About pages.
That page had a pulse.
What 100 About Pages Revealed
We read the About-page content of 100 optometry and eye-care practices across the United States.
This was a structured market audit, not a statistically representative national study. The percentages describe the pages we read. They don't describe every practice in America.
The pattern is still worth your attention.
Only 27 percent used strong business storytelling. Another 30 percent carried story elements but stopped short of a developed narrative. The remaining 43 percent leaned on credentials, services, technology and generalized statements of care.
Put plainly: 73 of the 100 practices never fully told their business story.
Not because they lacked one. Because nobody ever sat down and wrote it out.
One of the more humorous About pages we found read, “Vision is our passion. We accept all major insurance and credit cards.” Inspiring, isn't it.
Credentials Build Confidence. Stories Build Memory.
Your credentials matter. Patients want evidence that you're educated, experienced and capable of catching what a less careful examiner would miss.
But credentials are the cover charge.
The optometrist down the street has a degree. The practice across town bought the same optical coherence tomographer you did, in the same year, probably at the same meeting. The regional group has experienced doctors, fashionable frames and a friendly front desk.
Qualification reduces risk. It rarely creates preference.
A qualification tells patients why they should trust you. A story tells them why they should remember you.
That distinction carries weight in a category where competent practices start to look interchangeable. The same phrases recur on page after page: personalized care, state-of-the-art technology, comprehensive services, a commitment to excellence. Worthwhile, all of it. And photocopied so many times the letters have gone soft.
What nobody else has is your history and the decisions that came out of it. Differentiation starts there and almost nowhere else.
Biography Is Not Story
Many About pages confuse chronology with narrative. Undergraduate school, optometry school, residency, associations, marriage, children and a line about hobbies.
Those are facts, and they may leave a patient feeling acquainted with you. A sequence of facts isn't a story.
A story contains causality. Something happened. It changed what you believed, that belief produced a decision, and the decision still shapes how you care for patients on a Tuesday afternoon.
One of the stronger pages we read followed a doctor from childhood patient to adult patient to optometrist. The value wasn't that she became an eye doctor. The value was watching her own time in the examination chair determine the kind of doctor she chose to be.
Experience, belief, decision, and what the patient feels in the chair. That's the engine, and it's what most of these pages are missing.
The Stories Were Already There
The strongest practices needed no founding myth. Their stories came from recognizable moments in business and in life.
One traced its roots to a post-WWII founding and the generations who carried it forward. Another connected an immigrant journey to a professional calling. The best of them began with a single patient problem that turned into a specialization and, eventually, into a different kind of business.
The raw material was ordinary:
- A hometown return
- A mentor who redirected a career
- A parent handing a practice to a child
- A frustrating experience as somebody else's patient
- A community whose needs nobody was meeting
- Two people meeting at precisely the right time
Ordinary events. Consequential choices.
Storytelling doesn't make those events less truthful. It makes their meaning visible.
From Information to Identity
Our research showed us that practice websites operate at one of four levels.
Level one: credential marketing. The page proves competence through degrees, affiliations, tenure, technology and services.
Level two: personality marketing. The page adds warmth through hometowns, families, hobbies and personal interests.
Level three: brand positioning. The page states a philosophy: independent, patient-first, unhurried, community-centered.
Level four: business storytelling. The page explains where that philosophy came from, which decisions it produced and how patients experience it today.
Each level adds something. Value. The fourth is where information becomes identity.
It's one thing to say your practice provides unhurried care. It's another to describe the appointment that convinced you rushed care was unacceptable, and the scheduling decisions you made the following Monday.
Saying you're independent costs you nothing. Naming the year independence was tested, and what protecting it lets you do for patients now, costs you something and buys you more.
Facts inform. Meaning attaches.
Storytelling and Trust
Warmth alone doesn't create trust. Trust grows when words and actions form a coherent pattern.
A well-told business story gives context to your choices. Why do appointments feel different here? Why has one family cared for another across three generations? The answers help patients interpret what they experience.
There's a physiological argument here too, and it doesn't need much room.
Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist at Claremont Graduate University, found that character-driven stories raise oxytocin—the neurochemical he nicknamed the moral molecule, and that most people know as the trust hormone. The nickname oversells it, and the chemistry is still debated. The behavior is easier to trust. Give a reader a person, a difficulty and a consequence, and the reader leans in. Give that same reader a list of qualifications, and the reader scans.
The story says what you believe. The practice demonstrates it, and the patient feels the alignment.
Alignment supports trust. It also supports loyalty. A clear identity helps patients understand what they've joined, and the relationship becomes more than a transaction with a qualified provider. It becomes a connection to people, to principles and to continuity.
Memorability follows.
Patients will forget the model number of your retinal camera. They'll forget the professional associations somewhere after the second one. They're unlikely to forget the child who sat in an examination chair and decided to become a different kind of doctor.
Look at Your About Page Again
Don't start by rewriting it. Start by stepping back and interrogating it.
Does the page explain how the practice became what it is? Can a reader see how a belief formed years ago changes what happens in your chair today? Or does the page simply prove you're qualified?
Keep all of it—the credentials, the expertise, the technology and services that help a patient make an informed decision. Then find the story holding it together.
You probably have one. It may live in a founder's memory, or inside a succession conversation nobody has finished. It may be hidden in the reason you chose optometry, opened where you opened, or refused to practice a certain way.
Find the moment and the belief it created, and the decisions will be sitting right behind them.
Your About page should do more than establish credibility. It should give a patient a reason to remember you before they ever open your door.
Don't invent a story. Uncover yours.
About the Author
Charles Morris has spent more than twenty years inside the vision industry, at CooperVision, Paragon Vision Sciences and RevitalVision, most of it watching practices introduce themselves to patients and reach for the same page every time.
In August 2025 he founded Red Monarch, a Phoenix marketing agency built for vision care and medical devices and nothing else. He also teaches at Grand Canyon University, where students hear the same thing his clients do: the qualifications get you considered, and everything after is what matters most—effectively telling your story.
Red Monarch, Phoenix, Arizona. redmonarchmkt.com
At Red Monarch, we work only in vision care. We know the industry, we know the audience, and and we know how to find the story already living inside a practice. If you're ready to tell yours, let's talk.
