By Mary Hart for our “99 Ways to Make a Positive Difference in Your Pharmacy” blog series
It’s a natural tendency to shop where we feel comfortable. I personally will not shop at Forever 21 because I know that I won’t buy something there. The name of the store makes it clear that it caters to a demographic that doesn’t include me. However, that store brings in droves of pre-teen, teen and young adult women. The store has carved out its niche around a demographic group. Have you thought about the demographic segment you serve?
Don’t worry if you haven’t dug into this yet. You may be able to make a ballpark guess based on the ‘age’ of the faces you see picking up prescriptions, but how many other visitors come into your store that you may not see? You’re busy running the business, and you might think you don’t have time to figure out the demographics of your shoppers, let alone figure out THE most important demographic, which is that of the consumers that DON’T shop your store.
It’s easier than you might think. There is free demographic software available online that gives easily understandable results that you can use to identify segments of your community that you could better serve.
http://www.esri.com/software/bao/try-it-free
If you knew that 35% of your community spoke a language other than English (compared to a state average of 10%), you could consider hiring bi-lingual workers, or learn what products might be popular in their culture and stock them.
If 20% of your community is persons under the age of 5, increase or beef up your baby, kids, and toy sections. Make sure you also have products that cater to new moms and make their jobs easier.
Think about how you might specialize your front-end inventory to satisfy these potential customers as well as how you will let them know about your efforts to carry products that meet their needs. Drilling down into the demographics of your area could be very enlightening and open up the opportunity for attracting new, ongoing business.
Mary is Hamacher Resource Group’s Data Assets Coordinator and is responsible for HRG’s Data Assets team. Her team supports the documentation and execution of content capture including descriptive and transcriptive information related to product attributes. Mary is also responsible for the company’s project management process.