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Alliance Boots will Spearhead a Global Onslaught with our Goverment’s Assistance
The news broke last week that Alliance Boots was making plans to enter the Australian market. This appears to be another step in the global concentration of community pharmacy, which Australian pharmacy has been able to withstand. Until now. The original Boots pharmacy group, a UK-based company, was recently taken over by the largest retail…
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RFID Is a Basic Step Towards Specialist Goods & Services Success
Specialist Retailers like Rebecca Minkoff are benefiting more from service and supply chain agility. Australian specialist pharmacies lag well behind. Today, consumers are more informed, empowered and demanding. As the line between the physical and digital worlds blurs, retailers must differentiate themselves to drive customer loyalty. That means delighting customers and patients beyond expectation while getting…
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Make the Right Turn at the Next Crossroads
In the latest edition of Drug Topics, senior pharmacist Truman Lastinger describes a scenario for what he describes as Retail Pharmacy in the US. Because US pharmacy is a bit ahead in evolution than Australian pharmacy his comments are very relevant for today’s Australian pharmacy, the practice of which has split into three components- Retail…
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Trust – It Always Has to be Worked at
Pharmacy always appears in national polls measuring trust, and always in the first three, with results for pharmacists, nurses and doctors all highly ranked and all close together. Trust is an elusive concept to quantify and when evaluating, only a subjective opinion can be formed as a measurement. But in human beings it is something…
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Pharmacy has lost its chemistry
The pharmacy profession has lost its chemistry, it has become pharmacy against pharmacy until the cheaper more aggressive one triumphs against the other. The consequences of losing our chemistry is that we are no longer afraid of destroying the lives of the pharmacy next door, because they are looked at as a business and business must…
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Blackmore’s New Flagship Store – Now There’s a Model for Pharmacy!
Blackmores have designed and opened an innovative flagship store that offers the complete wellbeing experience, with rooms for private consultations with qualified naturopaths, a modern ‘Mindful Ocean’ system to assess mindfulness, the Wellbeing Bar for food and drink tasting as well as offering the comprehensive Blackmores’ product range. Located on Level 5 of Westfield, Bondi Junction, the…
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Seth Godin Clarity – as applied to pharmacy
I have long been admired the mental agility of Seth Godin, the US marketing guru who was the author of an Internet transforming book titled “The Ideavirus”. Basically, he identified and predicted what has now come to pass, in that “word of mouth” would be displaced by “word of mouse”. His words reported further along…
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Taking the Initiative with Co-Pay
Chemist Warehouse, as you would have imagined, has taken the initiative to discount the co-pay for PBS prescriptions by $1.00. The impact on a retail pharmacy like the warehouse model is not quite the same as for a community pharmacy, because budgets for retail pharmacies are geared for lower profit percentages combined with higher turnover…
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Countdown Has Commenced And It Is Woolworths’ Pharmacy Being Launched
In an article I wrote on June 1, 2015, I said: “Influential shareholders of Woolworths are seeking to invite Roger Corbett, the nemesis of Australian pharmacy, back into the fold as chairman.” “Corbett has been carefully planning succession to his current position of chairman of Fairfax Media Ltd citing very early in the process that…
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Marketing Focus – Essays in Management & Marketing
1. “We are family”. Three small words. But not a three-word slogan. Collectively, they represent a force of nature in society and business. The importance and power of the phrase were brought home to me at a nephew’s 50thbirthday party. He shared with his guests that he and I had had a counselling session when…