It’s important that patients and potential customers understand the breath of what your pharmacy offers. Here’s how to achieve this

It is easy to make assumptions about what customers and patients understand about your pharmacy. You and your team ‘live’ the pharmacy and may take it all for granted. You are possibly in the pharmacy for 40 hours each week, 46 weeks a year – that’s more than 1,800 hours per year. Many of your staff will be in the pharmacy for a similar number of hours. Your customers are in the pharmacy for, at most, a few hours each year, but that is still long enough to inform them about what you offer.

In addition, you, like most professionals, have your own ‘business speak’ that you use to talk about the pharmacy and what you do. Realistically, your customers are not going to understand what this means.

It is really important to make sure that you communicate what you do to people in ways that make sense to them, rather than in ways that only make sense to you. This, in essence, is marketing.

Why do you need to market your services? Community pharmacies have been around in a very similar form for more than 75 years, since the start of the NHS. Surely people know what you do by now? A good guess is that most customers already know that community pharmacies dispense prescriptions and sell medicines, and some know a little about the support you provide through these activities.

However, many people have limited understanding of the value you can add to the supply of their medicines, and as a result they can be resistant to your questions and your involvement. Patients – not to mention doctors, nurses and NHS managers – can be surprised at the wide range of services and support that pharmacists and pharmacy teams provide to the public and other healthcare professionals.

Wouldn’t it be great if, when you are engaging a customer with a service, they knew enough about your role and services to be open to the benefits you can offer, or even to request services such as MURs? Effective marketing can deliver this.

Consistency of message

People often put out marketing messages that are inconsistent with the implicit messages conveyed by their business, and find that their marketing has not worked.

Imagine you take your sports car to a garage for a service on the basis of the excellent professional service you have seen advertised and get to the garage to find an untidy, dirty, disorganised, back street space run by a bloke in jeans and a T-shirt. Would you entrust your car to them? You might receive a great service, but the marketing message is confused by the messages portrayed by the garage.

A striking example of this was with the big supermarkets such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s. When their sales were being eroded by lowcost supermarkets such as Aldi and Lidl, they introduced value ranges to complete. But they found that many customers didn’t recognise the value of these products and didn’t buy them, even though they were the same price and quality as those from the value supermarkets.

The value supermarkets had consistency in their message and their brand, while the big supermarkets didn’t. It appears that people didn’t feel they were getting good value from an inexpensive product being sold in an expensive-looking shop.