Editorial

From the desk of the editor

Welcome to the May 2012 homepage edition of i2P-Information to Pharmacists. Rollo Manning has been having some time out having staples removed from the site of his open heart surgery.He is now at home recuperating in Darwin, having arrived home last Friday, beating a cold and hasty retreat from Canberra.We all wish him a speedy recovery and hopefully, he will be fit enough to contribute by next month.
This month, Pharmedia discusses the toll that is taken when someone complains about you to an authority without good cause. Well, the good news is that you can now take action to protect yourself if such a complaint is made, and that may even include action for defamation. Read about a recent case involving two doctors, with Mark Coleman drawing on personal experience to illustrate.

read more
open full screen

Columns

Recent Comments

Click here to read...

Past Editions

Volume 1 Number 1
Volume 1 Number 2
Volume 1 Number 3
Volume 1 Number 4
Volume 1 Number 5
Volume 1 Number 6
Volume 1 Number 7
Volume 2 Number 1
Volume 2 Number 2
Volume 2 Number 3
Volume 2 Number 4
Volume 2 Number 5
Volume 2 Number 6
Volume 2 Number 7
Volume 2 Number 8
Volume 2 Number 9
Volume 2 Number 10
Volume 2 Number 11
Volume 3 Number 1
Volume 3 Number 2
Volume 3 Number 3
Volume 3 Number 4
Volume 3 Number 5
Volume 3 Number 6
Volume 3 Number 7
Volume 3 Number 8
Volume 3 Number 9
Volume 3 Number 10
Volume 3 Number 11
Volume 4 Number 1
Volume 4 Number 2
Volume 4 Number 3
Volume 4 Number 4

i2P Archives

EPublications

Click here for a list of epublications

Come to Shop – Return to Learn

• Printer-friendly version
• Send to friend
• PDF version
• Share

Neil Johnston articles by this author...

Neil Johnston is a pharmacist who trained as a management consultant. He was the first consultant to service the pharmacy profession and commenced practice as a full time consultant in 1972, specialising in community pharmacy management, pharmacy systems, preventive medicine and the marketing of professional services. He has owned, or part-owned a total of six pharmacies during his career, and for a decade spent time both as a clinical pharmacist and Chief Pharmacist in the public hospital system. He has been editor of i2P since 2000.

I started the New Year by researching retail environments that could be adapted to pharmacy and deliver pharmacy 2012 marketing requirements, with emphasis on "professional".
When I got to the Apple retail environment, it simply jumped off the page.
This could be the most important article you read this year.
Few would realise that the title to this article is actually the slogan for Apple Retail Stores, and is in fact the base philosophy behind one of the most successful forms of retail enterprise experienced in the 21st century.
The story of the Apple retail experience has a direct translation across to the malaise that is currently being felt by most Australian pharmacists, so a brief history of the Apple company may help to illuminate a realigned direction for community pharmacy that would capitalise on its strengths and help get off the discount treadmill.

open this article full screen

The Apple story starts in 1997 when Steve Jobs (the recently deceased original co-founder of the company) began the revitalisation of his enterprise.
His focus was initially on the retail presentation of the company's Macintosh computers and introducing new products such as the iMac and the Powerbook G3 and supported the physical presentation with an online store.

At that stage Apple still relied heavily on big box computer and electronics stores for most of their sales.

However, Jobs quickly found that potential customers had to deal with poorly trained and
ill-maintained Mac sections that resulted in minimal customer loyalty to the Apple brand and did not differentiate the Mac-user experience from Windows.

Jobs then made it a priority to separate Apple's ties to every big box retailer except for CompUSA who retained its Apple contract by agreeing to adopt Apple's "store within a store" concept.
This required that approximately 15% of each CompUSA store would be set aside for Mac hardware and software (including non-Apple products) and would play host to a part-time Apple salesperson.

However the "store within a store" approach was not successful in part because the Apple section was in the lowest-traffic area of CompUSA stores.

Jobs and his executives saw that they didn't have enough control over the presentation of Apple products so they decided on creating an independent Apple retail store.
In 1999, Jobs personally recruited Millard Drexler to serve on Apple's board of directors, Drexler was the CEO of Gap Inc. whose explosive growth had been attributed to retailing environments and marketing rather than its products or competitive prices.

Drexler was one of the few directors who supported Jobs' retail stores initiative, while the others on the board were sceptical as this would compete with their third party retailers.

In 2000, Jobs hired Ron Johnson from Target, where he had been vice president of merchandising responsible for launching the Michael Graves line of consumer products that raised Target's image beyond that of just an upscale K-Mart.

At Drexler's suggestion, Johnson then built a mock-up of an Apple store inside a warehouse near the company's headquarters in Cupertino, creating an in-store design team to handle development.
The Apple Store design that evolved from this initiative also had contributions from external architects and designers. With the Apple concept store they had the freedom and the budget to come up with an approach that broadly resembled Gap Inc. stores.

Apple has since re-established ties with major big box retailers like Best Buy chains because they had considerably more geographical reach than the existing network of Apple Stores. The relationship with Best Buy calls for the company to send Apple Solutions Consultants (ASCs) to train Best Buy employees to be familiar with Apple's product line-up and how Macs work.
The successful experience that Apple had with its retail stores has also been applied to Disney stores, since Jobs was elected to that company's board of directors in 2006.

The first two of the new Apple concept stores opened during May 2001.
Apple opened its 200th store on October 26, 2007 in Gilbert, Arizona, 2,251 days after opening its first store

Several publications and analysts predicted the failure of Apple Stores, based on sales made per square foot which was a standard metric in computer retail at the time.
It was thought that because of the stores' diminutive size and non-aggressive sales team, Apple would succeed in presenting the Mac but fail in making a significant number of sales, despite the huge turnout for the various openings.

However, Apple proved its critics wrong and by 2007 it ranked among the top retailers in the world. According to Fortune Magazine; "and not just the architecture.Saks, whose flagship store is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 - tops for electronics retailers - while Tiffany & Co takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany's for breakfast, but at $4,032 per square foot, Apple is eating everyone's lunch".

Originally, Apple Stores contained a dedicated point of sale station. However, in 2006, Apple began introducing a new store layout and design with surgical-grade stainless steel walls and backlit signage. The new store design replaced the dedicated point of sale station with the hand-held “EasyPay” system.

A dedicated point of sale station still exists in most of these stores to facilitate transactions not paid for by credit card. Apple has recently changed their “EasyPay” systems to operate on iPod Touch, replacing the previous Windows-based system. The iPods feature a custom housing, the Infinite Peripherals Linēa-Pro bar code scanner and card reader, to allow the same transactions on the iPod.

One of the main features of an Apple store is the Genius Bar.
The Genius Bar is a facility where customers can receive technical advice or set up service and repair for their products. The Genius Bar provides software support for Mac OSX and hardware service on products that are not classified as vintage or obsolete.

However, in most cases the Geniuses (highly trained assistants) will at least attempt to assist customers with older hardware.

Originally, visitors to the Genius Bar were offered free Evian Water. Apple dropped this amenity in February 2002.
To address increasing numbers of iPod customers at the Genius Bar, some new stores also feature an iPod Bar.

Most new stores feature a station called The Studio, a Genius Bar-like setting where customers can meet with a "Creative" and receive help with projects ranging from organising a photo album to music composition to film editing. Some of the older stores are being considered to carry a Studio in a future remodel, in some cases replacing the older theatres.

Many stores feature a Theatre for presentations and workshops and a Studio for training with Apple products; all stores offer a Genius Bar for technical support and repairs, as well as free workshops available to the public

Note that on the surface, Apple seems to have had an amazing overnight success for its retail concept.

But the reality was four years of intensive planning involving the hiring of retail executives experienced in establishing retail environments that did not rely on deep discounting, plus a further six years to reach the status of “top retailer” based on sales per square foot.
This type of thinking is desperately needed in pharmacy to counteract the thinking dominated by the big “yellow boxes”.

Pharmacy's hidden strength that cannot be easily duplicated or discounted is its information service, hidden under the detritus of a PBS system that has been on the downside of its life cycle graph for some years now.

The “Genius Bar” adapted for pharmacy and appropriately renamed needs to become the centre-piece of each pharmacy and supported by good design features.

“Health Station” might be a suitable name- but there are undoubtedly better marketing names.

As Health Stations are scheduled by appointments, it is a feature that could easily support a range of practice pharmacists building a reputation based on knowledge and creative solutions.
Appropriate pharmacy names for staff representing the “genius” and the “creative” also need to be established.

This type of setting would be best suited to a range of senior pharmacists backed up by a range of younger pharmacists under a suitable mentoring program.

Revenues to support the Health Station facility could be generated on a fee for service basis.

It is suggested that the first interview be styled as a survey interview and be at no charge to the patient, while subsequent “solution” interviews be at a set fee.

Private label medications and individually compounded prescriptions could be utilised as income extensions worked into any created patient program.
Health Stations, like the Apple Genius Bars, can become the centre-piece for any pharmacy (rather than the dispensary).

It could be said that 2012 may be the definitive point in time where dispensaries can be controlled virtually by technicians (under the supervision of a pharmacist-in-charge), with the information components normally attached to the dispensary, migrating to the Health Stations.

A work flow for schedule 3 sales could also be attached.

This proven solution, illustrated by the Apple retail experience, allows complex products (health or IT) to be broken down into logical education modules delivered to a patients appropriately.

It allows for a pharmacist/patient relationship to develop, provides suitable employment for experienced senior pharmacists, a learning environment for developing pharmacists and even a succession model for a pharmacist proprietor if the pharmacy is structured as a company and working pharmacists are able to buy in progressively.
The fact that pharmacy company structures do not seem to be evolving along these lines needs a stimulus to create the necessary change.

The current pharmacy landscape needs to change dramatically if we are to preserve the profession for future graduates. They must be extremely disappointed with what they currently see and existing proprietors must also be getting "edgy" as bankruptcy becomes more common.

Clinical Newsfeed

Click here to read more...

Research Reports

Practice Development

Information Technology

Preventive Medicine

i2P Alliance Partners