Thoughts

Everyone understands the concept of a ladder. You start at the bottom and work you way up, rung by rung to reach your goal. That might be a light bulb that needs replacing, a bookshelf that needs reaching or (horror of horrors) a gutter that needs cleaning. There is another kind of ladder though. If you haven’t heard of the concept of the customer benefit ladder then you are about to learn something useful.

Positioning is at the heart of marketing and is a key driver for the decisions you make about how how to design, deliver and promote your products. Pretty important then. Whether you are a pharmacist thinking about developing your next clinical service or you provide products and services for pharmacists, get your positioning right and you have a solid foundation.

Unless you have limitless resources targeting is critical. Selecting which market segments you will choose to focus on initially is an important step and one that enables you to maximise return on your investment. Targeting is a little like the application of topical treatments. No, it is, really. Stick with me on this one.

Whether you busy yourself delivering pharmaceutical care directly to patients or you sell products or services into the pharmacy market itself, you will be thinking about market segmentation. Market segmentation is the process of separating the total market for your product into groups that are homogeneous within and heterogeneous without. That is, the same within and different without. There. Glad we got that out of the way. Now, what does it really mean and is it useful to you?

How do you make decisions in your business? If you are basing decision making on beliefs founded on limited personal experience, limited group experience or third hand experiences you are missing the real opportunity to learn from the people who have the answers, your customers.