How To Boost Your Pharma Business:

Turning prescription collectors into shoppers can boost the bottom line of any pharmacy business. One drug manufacturer is offering pharmacies help to make their sales space more profitable.The credit crunch is biting hard. However, according to the primary care team at Proctor & Gamble, retailers who sell healthcare products are unlikely to be affected.Research undertaken by P&G suggests that shoppers will be more tempted to cut their spending on luxuries, such as entertainment, eating out and leisure activities before considering a cut in spending on products related to health and personal care.

P&G also believes that many pharmacies are not maximising the potential for retail sales that their prescription footfall can deliver. Many pharmacy customers who are collecting a prescription will often make a beeline for the counter, often ignoring the “front of shop” sales space.

Rob Jackson, UK pharmacy in-store innovations manager for P&G, believes these prescription collectors can be turned into shoppers by getting the front-of-store image right. He says that shoppers usually navigate their way around a retail outlet by deselecting the areas they do not want to visit.If your sales area is difficult to navigate, shoppers may choose to shop elsewhere, where the products they want to buy are easier to find.

Tips for improving store image:

Logical separation

Split your selling space into zones (eg, skin care, hair care, cosmetics) and assign each zone an appropriate space according to the size of your pharmacy.

Within each zone, groups of products should be arranged logically so that when a customer buys one product, it is surrounded by other products that may also be of use (eg, wet wipes should be placed next to nappies).

Use signpost brands

Customers often use brand names to help them find the product they are looking for. This may not be the brand they intend to buy, but is often used as a guide by consumers to locate their desired product.

For example, a customer may look for Colgate when searching for toothpaste. These “signpost brands” should be placed in the most prominent position on the shelf (ie, at eye level), so that customers can easily find what they want to buy.

Pharmacy staff should know which brands are most popular with their customers, since this will help to identify signpost brands.

De-clutter

Shoppers have a short attention span and if they cannot find what they are looking for quickly they will give up and go somewhere else. Pharmacies that have lots of products crammed onto shelves are difficult to navigate, so customers are more likely to go elsewhere.

Furthermore, research has shown that a less cluttered shelf appears to the consumer to have greater product range. Pharmacies should sell off unpopular brands cheaply to clear some space.

Grab customers’ attention

Pharmacy customers often walk straight to the pharmacy counter from the entrance to hand in their prescription, ignoring everything they pass. By placing something different in the middle of an aisle, customers can be distracted into stopping and, possibly, becoming shoppers.

Anything that is not present anywhere else in that aisle, such as different shelving, different lighting or a cosmetics stand, can be a potential distraction.

Imaginative information sources

Customers shop with peripheral vision and are often hungry for new information. If you can provide some interesting information about a new product that customers may have seen advertised on television, this offers another possibility for grabbing their attention — particularly if the information is presented in an imaginative way.

However, you should not overdo such information displays because, if they become too common, they are more likely to be ignored. Pharmacy owners should think twice about having more than one information point in each aisle.

Getting the prices right:

Speaking at the 2008 UniChem convention in Muscat, Oman (12–18 October), Joanna Dee, UK pharmacy manager at P&G, offered the following advice regarding pricing:

Clear pricing:

Make sure the price for all products is marked clearly — many consumers believe no price suggests dishonest pricing.

Price benchmarking:

Pharmacies can afford to charge a small premium but check prices against your local competition.

Price point barriers:

Be aware of “price point barriers”, where price increases will appear more significant to consumers (eg, increasing a product’s price from £1.89 to £1.99 appears less significant than an increase from £1.99 to £2.09).

The Primary Care programme:

The advice from Mr Jackson and Ms Dee, along with access to national consumer statistics (IRI data), forms the basis of P&G’s Primary Care programme — a service offered to community pharmacies to remerchandise their retail space.

From January to June 2008, 45 test stores underwent the P&G remerchandising process. These stores were compared with 45 control stores over a six-month period.

The test stores increased their sales on health and beauty products (when compared with the same period the previous year) by 32 per cent. The control stores increased their sales by 12 per cent.

However, according to Ms Dee, the sales improvements in the test stores were most noticeable in the first month after remerchandising had taken place. “Pharmacies must recognise that remerchandising is not a one-off activity,” she says. “It requires the commitment of the entire [pharmacy] team to keep the retail area up to date.”

Goes Pharmacy in Coventry was one of the test stores. Its proprietor, John Goes, commended the programme: “Many community pharmacists would benefit from help to ensure we meet the demands of the modern consumer. For independent pharmacists, who do not have head office support, this programme can only be positive, since it costs nothing.”

Mr Goes said he has never felt pressured by P&G to stock more of its goods. Rather, the programme encourages pharmacists to stock the best-selling goods, regardless of manufacturer.

In parallel with the programme, P&G has launched a training initiative for community pharmacy staff entitled “Retail skills made easy”. This initiative is intended to help pharmacy support staff take responsibility for merchandising and will cost £95.