Conference theming and planning, venue activation, social media promotion and facilitation for retailers facing tough challenges

Change is never easy, especially when it affects your bottom line. But change can be an opportunity to refocus, grow into new areas, and find new ways of meeting your customers’ needs. Through engaging speakers and social media collaboration, this is the message Devon delivered to business owners in a besieged industry at this year’s conference.

This year’s Conference confronted the truth: community pharmacy is witnessing a shift wherein drug dispensing income is diminishing and clinical services  are expected to grow. Patient uptake of pharmacist-provided clinical services, a critical success factor, will depend on the ability of pharmacists to engage even more closely with patients and customers, gain their trust and ensure they follow advice. Similarly, with a better understanding of patients’ motivations and behaviours, retailers can adopt approaches to merchandising and marketing in the front shop to improve margins and revenues. 

While the Conference offered practical guidance to owners and operators as the sector confronts big changes, the theme departed from the usual trade group conference liturgy, and challenged participants to ‘journey beyond consciousness’ to gain a richer understanding of their customer’s motivations and behaviours. Presentations that tackled the worlds of behavioural economics and behavioural psychology encouraged delegates to look at their business with a fresh set of eyes and reconsider their position in the healthcare continuum and as everyday retailers.

The Conference featured keynote speakers from academia, on the rules of influence and getting patients to follow your advice, from marketing, on how consumers make their purchasing decisions, from health and wellness, on value added services pharmacists can provide to customers and ways to collaborate with other primary care providers, and from government, on the future of provincial formularies and funding for pharmacy services.

Featured speaker’s included:

·         Dr. Robert Cialdini, the world’s most cited (living!) social psychologist, adapted the principles of influence from his best-selling book to apply to pharmacy practices and patient relations.

·         Carman Allison, Director of Consumer Insights, North America, Nielsen Company,  is an expert on consumer behaviour and private label brands. He used Nielsen Company’s market research data to present on front of shop behaviour to improve sales, and how private label products can effectively compete with national brands.

·         Dr. Michael Murray, a renowned expert in natural medicine products, addressed the Conference about opportunities for pharmacists to support patient health with products and services that go beyond the scope of the traditional pharmaceutical industry.

·         Dr. Robert Nease, a behavioural economist and Chief Scientist at Express Scripts, presented on his 2010 Drug Trend Report which identifies the gap between patient intent and patient behaviour, and proposes solutions to bridge it.

·         Dr. Pravin Mehta, a general practitioner and president-elect of Doctors Manitoba, spoke about opportunities for pharmacists to collaborate with other primary healthcare specialists to provide inter-professional care and add value to the services they provide patients.

Participants left the conference with a renewed sense of optimism that the challenges they face are in fact an opportunity to improve every aspect of their business. Further, they left with practical advice to enable them to make the changes that will put their business ahead, and a rich sense of the motivations that customers rely on to make everyday decisions about their health or consumer behaviour. 

Click this copy of the program to visit the Conference facebook page and see more pictures