As we wind down this series I thought I’d provide a retrospective on the 27 preceding blog posts: what’s still true, what’s changed and, in our next and final post, a look ahead at what I suspect we’ll see in the pharmacy business.
The Winning Performers
One of the best parts of writing this blog is that it gave me a motivation and opportunity to meet and talk with community pharmacists across the country. While most of those discussions were focused on identifying the biggest marketing problems facing community pharmacies, there were some noteworthy traits among the higher-performing community pharmacies. These themes were covered in dedicated blogs and mentioned in others.
Trait 1: They know what “value” really means
The most dominant common characteristic in winning performers was found without exception: The owner understands the primacy of the customer in articulating what value means and formulating a plan to provide it. This does not mean they always give into the customer’s desires or blindly buy into the notion that “the customer is always right,” nor even that they have some collectively exhaustive list of customer needs that they are built around.
Rather, they service that primacy by the attention they pay to their positioning and target market, both of which they can discuss with a high degree of specificity. They understand that positioning statements are not statements of aspirations, nor do they represent some abstract concept of what a pharmacy should be. Rather, in keeping with the primacy of the customer, they start with their so-called target market: those types of consumers they feel inhabit their local community and around which they can customize their service.
Once the target market is identified, they formulate their positioning in terms a kind of customer experience they believe their customer wants, whether that be extensive service, fast service (note: it’s hard to be extensive and fast) or some special set of needs. That positioning then becomes the starting point in making almost every significant decision, whether strategic or tactical. They understand that their positioning creates customer expectations and, in doing so, provides the reason their loyal customers keep coming back. As such, nearly everything can be evaluated in terms of its consistency with a pharmacy’s positioning.
For example, it is rare that any community pharmacy will find itself with lower costs than national chains. Therefore, trying to be the lowest-priced store is not advised. Rather, community pharmacies are encouraged to reflect the character of local neighbourhood, catering their marketing to its peculiar nature (see blog posts 9, 10, 14 and 22). By that token, stores in neighbourhoods dominated by university students should not be identical – in product mix, pricing, store layout, even background music – to stores located near seniors’ homes or in medical arts buildings. In contrast, all stores within a national chain will tend to be similar, and therein lies the community pharmacist’s window of opportunity: while chains standardize, community pharmacies localize.
Given the importance of positioning, it shouldn’t be surprising that we dedicated our first three blogs to helping readers define their positioning and noted in many of the subsequent blogs that selecting from alternative ways of performing marketing tasks – service quality, store layouts, product assortment, etc. – depended upon the pharmacy’s positioning and target market. To further assist in that task, we dedicated blog posts 18–21 to understanding the distinctive needs and attitudes of millennials, seniors, women, and men. Check these out if you’d like to do a quick audit of your positioning and alignment with it.
Trait 2: They put service first
A second common characteristic of higher-performing pharmacies is the realization that while positioning starts with the owner/pharmacist, it remains an abstract concept void of impact on performance unless it is manifest in the actions of staff. Almost universally, these pharmacists noted that their number one criterion in hiring decisions is “a service attitude.” As one pharmacist noted “I can train how to do the job but not the desire to do it well.”
Once they assemble a staff with a “natural predisposition toward customer service,” the winning pharmacies go to great lengths to ensure that that energy is directed into the right kinds of actions. There are any number of devices that can be used to that end. Regular meetings and training provide initial orientation to the positioning. Equally important, that orientation is constantly reinforced by devices like informal reminders and motivational signage. One pharmacy had an ongoing competition in which points were awarded for certain behaviours; in another, staff wore badges inviting customers to engage with them. If this is an area of current interest, you may want to review our earlier blogs on the in-store experience and customer service.
Trait 3: They build relationships
The higher-performing pharmacies have “rich” communications programs with their customers. When I say “rich” I do not mean they spend an exorbitant amount of time and money on marketing or advertising (although some do). Rather, they are systematic in how they approach their spending and spend to achieve deep relationships with a concentrated market rather than diluting their message over a broad and diverse market. It is for this reason that they also demonstrate the hallmark characteristics of businesses that excel at so-called “loyalty management” (see blog posts 12 and 13).
These are not the types of operations who fund community teams purely out of charity, nor are they the type to expect a single ad, promotion or story to bring about a massive onslaught of business. Instead, these firms make a systematic assault on their market and often have specific performance expectations tied to past experiences with their market and the media in question. They are the consummate “project planners.”
While they may not develop a formal campaign plan, upon questioning, they could all recite the 6 M’s behind a particular communications piece, and I was impressed by the number who developed campaign objectives around stages of the adoption process (see Awareness–Trial–Adoption in blog posts 15, 23, 24, 25 and 26).
A Final Note on “Rocket Science”
As you can see from the above, success does not require rocket science, it requires discipline: the discipline to think things through before acting and the discipline to stick to that plan. We have a name for the kind of marketing that doesn’t require such discipline: Luck. Unfortunately, luck will be a rare commodity in the coming years. We’ll see why in our next – and final – blog post.
Written by Ken Wong
