Pharmacy Market Research [2 of 2]: What makes your pharmacy special?
What is Market Research? The first thing that most likely comes to mind are the demographics of your target market. While it is important to know the average income, age, sex, ethnic background, etc. of your ideal customer, it is vital to the success and growth of your pharmacy to know where you fall in regards to your competition’s prices, customer service, products and services.
The fact is, you cannot build a successful pharmacy without having the right data about customers, products and the competitive market in general. 360 degree market research is an essential management tool for a viable business and marketing plan enabling any company to survive and thrive in today’s fiercely competitive market conditions, especially for independent pharmacies in a world of Big Boxes and Mail-order .
What is the best way to perform market research?
Through surveys, advertising research, internet research, and other pharmacy marketing and information gathering techniques, you can examine and learn the trends of the retail pharmacy industry, as well as individual preferences of your existing and potential customers. The best way to obtain this key information is by talking to your customers and asking them, either face-to-face or through a well-written survey, why they choose your pharmacy over the store down the street. Here are a few key questions to ask:
- On a scale of 1-10, how likely is it that you would recommend our pharmacy to friends and colleagues?
- What specifically would you tell someone to get them to try our pharmacy?
- If below a 10, what would it take for you to rank our pharmacy a 10?
- If below an 8, what is the reason or reasons for your score?
How is your experience with our pharmacy different than other similar pharmacies
Through these types of questions, you’ll be able to determine the exact reasons why your pharmacy is different from your competition. Survey all of your customers, analyze the results and strategically use them to your advantage. For example, if you notice a trend in the survey results that says people go to your pharmacy because it is locally-owned and small, then use it to your advantage.
In The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Chapter 6, "Weak Points and Strong," explains how opportunities come from the openings in the environment caused by the relative weakness of your enemy in a given area. If your customers love you because you are small, then use it against your big-box competition. If people bring their prescriptions to your pharmacy because your prices are lower, gear your marketing efforts around the price gaps. Being able to discover the weaknesses of your enemy, and more importantly the strengths of your pharmacy, will allow you to define and target your marketing and business development strategies and tactics more effectively and efficiently.
It’s action time!
Over the past two weeks you’ve received a lot of information from this blog. What are you going to do now? If you learn and understand all these concepts, but don’t take action, nothing’s going to change and your pharmacy is going to remain in it’s current state indefinitely.
Based on the concepts we recently taught you, here are three ways that will help change your current state and help you build a better business…for FREE!
Try out one or all of these defining ideas and bring feedback to us. We’d love to hear about your experiences and things you want to accomplish. We’d love to help out any way we can. In fact, we’ll give FREE 30 minute pharmacy business development consultations to the first 5 people who respond because we really want to make a difference in this industry.
