You’ve divided your market into segments. You’ve decided which segment(s) to serve or at least prioritized them. You’ve developed profiles of each segment based on some combination of their socio-demographic/economic characteristics and their occasion of use. You’ve chosen a positioning that reflects a specific and relevant customer benefit that you feel you can provide better than the competition. You’ve laid out your store, selected an assortment of merchandise and trained your staff – all with an eye towards delivering on that positioning – and developed marketing communications (ads, social media, webpages, etc.) that convey your value proposition. In short, you’ve done everything by the book. You sit back in anticipation of consumer response and… and… nothing happens!

All of which raises the question, “Why aren’t customers doing what they are supposed to do?” Before concluding that your strategy is wrong or that customers are irrational – and therefore feeling tempted to dump the whole idea – just remember: “The customer is always right.” That being said, maybe the better question to ask is, “Am I sure my customers know what they are supposed to do?”

The Devil Is in the Details

Success requires both the right strategy and the right set of tactics to execute that strategy. Strategy can be thought of as being the selection of a pathway that maximizes your profit potential; execution is what percentage of that potential you realize. You must have both: great execution of a bad strategy will hasten your demise; bad execution of great strategy not only costs you money, but also results in a missed opportunity.

How do you know if you have an execution problem? Here is a simple framework.

The Relationship Hierarchy

Ultimately, we want to develop loyal customers. But they cannot become loyal buyers until they have tried us at least once. And they cannot try something if they don’t know it exists. In short, we need to walk our customer through three distinct stages in the development of a relationship: awareness, which leads to a trial, which is so satisfying that customers adopt us as their preferred supplier.

Ideally, we want 100% of our target market to be aware of what we offer. We’d like that offer to be so relevant to their needs that 100% of them try us out. Finally, we’d like our delivery to be so flawless and satisfying that 100% of those who try us, love us. If we multiply those numbers (i.e. 100% × 100% × 100%), we get the percentage of our strategy’s potential that we realize. By contrast, if, for example, only 80% of our customers see our promotions and only 50% of them are moved to trial and 25% to adoption, then we are only achieving 80% × 50% × 25% = 10% of our potential: in other words, we’ll only realize 10% of our expected sales.

This framework not only lets us see how much we’ve lost, it also tells us where we lost it and whether we can improve cost effectively. For example, in the above example, suppose we raised awareness from 80% to 90%. We’d now be achieving (90% × 50% × 25% =) 11.25% of our potential. The incremental (11.25 – 10 =) 1.25% of sales can now be compared with the cost of raising awareness to determine whether it is cost justified.

The usual way we get awareness, trial and adoption numbers is by surveying members of our target market. While it may be beyond the resources of a community pharmacy to hire a research agency to undertake such a project, most university or community college business schools will have students in a market research course who would be happy to undertake a project like this for little money, or professors who assign projects like this for demonstration purposes or for course credit (contact your local school to see if this is possible).

Even if you can’t get hard numbers you can still “guesstimate” those numbers based on casual conversations with shoppers, neighbours and staff. The questions are simple:

    1. Did you see the communication?
    2. What impression did it make? Was it favorable?
    3. Did you visit the store? Was your impression reinforced?

Improving Your Performance

All of this data is, at this point, purely diagnostic. It tells you whether you have a problem and the nature of the problem. However, it doesn’t tell you what you need to do to solve the problem.

Our next three blogs will be dedicated to overcoming problems in awareness, trial and adoption (respectively). We’ll break each relationship stage down and identify the most common sources of performance shortfalls in each area. These lists can not only be used to refine your evaluation of past efforts, but can also be used to review future plans to ensure that these problems are avoided.

Written by Ken Wong

Men come in all sizes and shapes. They are not all testosterone-driven frat boys. Nor are they all turning into hyper-sensitive, family-oriented types. Nor are they all metro-sexuals. Nor do they all like sports… or cars… or anything else. This may sound like a cliché, but there really is no such thing as a “typical” male anymore. And anyone designing marketing efforts or stores around such stereotypes will likely find themselves sorely disappointed in the results they generate.

The Base Case

Notwithstanding my comments above, there is a considerable amount written on typical gender differences in how they view the world. While clearly there will be exceptions to every rule, pharmacies that seek to augment existing sales with a male-driven clientele would be well advised to consider the following in designing programs that will deliver the message in a way men will understand:

Men tend to be more immediate. They are not browsers. They tend to shop to satisfy immediate needs. By contrast, women will shop for both what is needed now and what they feel they will need in the future. One study found that men are more likely than women to stop taking antibiotics as soon as they feel better rather than continuing to take them as directed for the duration of the prescription. This could have a major impact on things like store layout. Men want to find what they need as soon as they enter the store (the quicker to leave) and will insist on clear signage; women, on the other hand, while liking such convenience, are more prepared to “treasure hunt.”

Men tend to relate to spaces that are compartmentalized and sequential. Women tend to be more relational in how they see space. Taken at face value, this implies that women will be content to browse, say, a shampoo aisle containing an array of products, while men would prefer to proceed directly to a section of the aisle labeled “men’s products.”

Men tend to be more concrete and visually oriented. Men follow the credo “What you see is what you get” and tend to think about direct cause-and-effect relationships. By contrast, women are more contextual and have a greater tendency to see multiple factors leading to one end result. This implies that men will tend to buy individual items whereas women will put together a package. This has obvious implications for promoting health and beauty or healthcare-related products. It also suggests that men need to be told messages in very direct language (“if A then B”), while women can be addressed in more subtle ways (“of all the things that lead to B, A is an important component”).

Men tend to be more ego-centric. Men relate to other people as competition, while women see other people as a source of strength. Thus men tend to shop alone while women shop with others. (See “Marketing to Men,” Branding Strategy Insider, April 19, 2010 for more insights.) 

Male Roles

Marketing to men would be simple if you believed that “men will be men” and, by extension, all men will behave (i.e., shop) following some narrowly defined stereotype. However, the evidence suggests that thinking this way is, at best, naïve. Regrettably, surveys of men’s attitudes suggest that naïveté is running rampant in marketing: a prominent US agency found that 79% of American males feel that advertising is out of touch with their reality and half of all men feel their role in society is unclear. It isn’t hard to see how this could occur.

Demographic realities suggest that an increasing number of males will spend time caring for elderly parents. Will they shop for them as they do when manifesting their ego-centric (see above) shopping tendencies? Similarly, at some points in life, many men will shop for their family and not just themselves: given the variety of products being bought, will they still value the heavily compartmentalized retail “man cave”? The answer more likely correct is “no.”

Online Research and a Little Common-sense

Unfortunately, we know very little about the precise changes in behaviour that occur as men move in and out of their different roles. As a result, if we don’t want to fall victim to widely held stereotypes, we need to ask ourselves, intuitively, “What are the major roles men play and at what stage in life?” We can then ask ourselves, “Given the demographics of my neighbourhood, which roles do I need to serve? How?”

For example, we can estimate with statistical precision the probability that a man is a father. We can even make this estimate at different income and age levels using StatsCan data. Once we compare our estimate to our neighbourhood’s demographics, we can determine whether or not we would be well served to be highly “father friendly” or whether to serve them in a collateral way.

If we decide that fathers are a viable target market, an hour or so online would deliver some interesting facts about how men feel about this role. For example:

• 87% feel that being a good father is an important part of who they are.
• While 63% believe they spend more time with their kids than their fathers did, 76% of men want to spend more time with their kids.
• Work and financial responsibilities are seen as the major obstacles they face in being a better father.
• While 70% of women feel their mate is a “good father,” only 57% of men felt they qualified.

These data tell us that playing the “dad card” is a great way to relate to men. It also tells us that the more we can do with store layout, service staff, product assortment and similar things to “save time and save money,” the more we can help relieve their guilt and provide a reason to give us their patronage. That’s the promise we need to make.

Communicating the Promise

Marketing makes promises the business has to keep… and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If the “dad card” is in your future, then you need to find a concrete and visually oriented way to offer, in a compartmentalized space, the immediate delivery of an ego-centric customer benefit. After all, men may decide what they want based on the role they play, but, when it comes to processing information… they are, after all, men.

Written by Ken Wong