SEPTEMBER,Edition # 34, 2001

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Statistics!
We all know the rest of the quote.
Often embellished by describing the gatherer and seller proponents as scumbags, whores, parasites and then some people really get serious and nasty and say worse things.
Market research!
Sounds expensive and complicated (often is) - consisting of columns, graphs, pie charts and other, often overly, mysterious ways of confusing simple messages. Who needs it?
You do.
It just requires the right information to be made available, at the right time and in the right manner.
Which, is not yet the case.
What goes on behind the scene?
There are lots of people gathering a lot of data and asking a long list of questions in many and different ways.
Perennial questions include 'how many pharmacies', 'what percentage of the GDP', 'number of scripts', 'how many for Viagra' and other favourites.
Then there are the thoughtful questions - 'how many scripts are actually presented for dispensing', 'what percentage of PBS scripts end up in migrant countries' and so forth.
Then there are the commercial market share numbers - 'share of the sunglass market', 'share of the photographic market'.
Often it is pure blather to the average pharmacy.
More valuable to the suppliers and certainly very important to the vendors of statistics and market share reports.
It is reasonably big business - particularly the market research that is
a) purely pharmacy and say politically sensitive (PBS) and
b) the OTC and other marketplace products that overlap with general retail industry statistics.
The latter becomes crucial to round out the expensive grocery market research reports the suppliers live by.
Live by?
You bet.
These reports 'keep the score' and indicate how the marketing, advertising and general promotional cost and investment is working. It is a big and important part of the cost of gaining market share. Market share equals shelf space equals market share, a cyclical thing.
Hullo.
Where is the pharmacy place in the sun from this, and for this, revenue stream? Whose data are they compiling, analysing, publishing and selling?
Well, mostly it is your individual data, recirculated from warehouse withdrawal data (what was sold by the wholesaler) and electronic pull backs from dispensary, POS and back rooms systems.
You, of course, knew that didn't you?
It is not only the commercial tea leaf readers who pore over the data.
Academics and government researchers and other sundry elite adders and botherers of numbers also get into the statistics of pharmacy trade.
The arithmetical basis is that an entity of one equals a value of zip, in terms of meaningful information.
It takes a large network of pharmacies to usefully compile results from to maximise the ability (to the maximum of 5000, or is that a wrong number?) to get useable, saleable, valuable figures.
Therefore your pharmacy, alone, 'selling 1/5000th of a market share is not lusted after - being one of thousands however, is very tasty.
Yet, perhaps unbeknown to you, someone is using your data, commercially, and not a penny of the benefit falls onto your pocket or purse.
Funny that.
The big end of town values this collective pool of information as the aphrodisiac to their performance and results.
Perhaps it is time they shared the pleasure and the pain a little more equally.
The professional use and management value of accurate, timely and useful statistics is invaluable, legitimate and a compelling business tool.
No one would expect the industry, professions, governments and academics to rely on stargazers to run their operations and benchmark relative performances. However, who is selling what to whom?
If it is your data, mixed and matched with hundreds and thousands of other pharmacies, so what?
Well, this data repackaged as retail information is extremely useful to an independent operator.
How are we going to make this happen?
To be continued in a coming issue - so keep reading.
Ends

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