Your pharmacy, your brand
Make sure customers know what you stand for and what they can come to you for. What image do you want to convey? What are your values and goals? How do you wish to profile yourself? It’s important to make your pharmacy visible as a brand.
Who do you want to be?
Before you get started with communication, you must answer various important questions for yourself. What kind of pharmacy do you want to be and how will you profile yourself? What image would you like to convey? How do you wish to position yourself? Would you prefer to be a generalist or a specialist, e.g. in sports nutrition? This also determines the customer base that you will appeal to.
Who is your target audience?
The more accurately you can identify your target group, the more targeted your communications will be. Who are your patients and how do they think? If your target group consists of various different profiles, you can start communicating generally. Or if there are many young families in the area, or perhaps lots of older people instead, you can focus on them a little more.
Create a persona
Creating a ‘persona’ or ideal customer profile will give you a (fictitious) picture of your target group(s).
This involves devising a fictitious profile and mapping out as many details as possible. For example:
Lisa is a young mother aged 31. She and her partner have a three-year-old daughter. They live near their daughter’s future school and both work full-time. Lisa is currently struggling with fatigue, especially now that her daughter is falling ill more often since she started going to kindergarten. She is active in Facebook groups that focus on motherhood and is looking for advice and tips to keep her family as healthy as possible. Lisa often visits the doctor and pharmacy, both for her daughter and for herself. → Lisa is seeking advice and is looking for experts to provide it. She is active on Facebook, where you can help her with relevant articles, tips and products to combat fatigue, advice on work-life balance and so on. Lisa is ‘one of the many’ young mothers who struggle to balance their professional, social and domestic life.
Make sure you have a professional image
You can make a good impression not only with your service, but also with your pharmacy’s image. If you want a contemporary look, extend this to your interior and the technology in your pharmacy. And don’t forget your display window, as this is the first thing people see. Make sure it is clearly laid out, with calming colours and lighting, products that are up to date and not too many promos. Make your display window look inviting, yet without any sense of obligation. The same goes in your pharmacy: make sure that customers feel good and want to come back.
Ensure familiarity with your logo and corporate identity
People used to identify a pharmacy by the green cross outside. These days, however, your pharmacy is more than that: it is a brand, with its own identity. You can express this visually with a logo and a corporate identity. So be sure to think about this carefully. Which corporate identity is aligned with the way you are profiling yourself? It will be hard to profile yourself as a modern pharmacy if your corporate identity is old-fashioned.
If you use your corporate identity consistently, you will also ensure familiarity. As a result, you should feature your corporate identity everywhere: in your pharmacy, on your printed material, website, stickers, samples, etc.
In addition to the logo, you also need to think about the associated colours and your photos. Get help from a professional in this area. And remember: if you know how you want to profile yourself, you’re already halfway there.