Our client, a pharmaceutical company with various product lines, wanted to understand its positioning in Switzerland with respect to one of its major products. The product was classified as a category C product (OTC) which can only be distributed through pharmacies. Hence, the main research target was to understand how the respective pharmacies were setting prices and placements of the respective product and how well their competence in marketing the product was. Based on these knowledge the client wanted to manage its own marketing, POS marketing and to manage its local sales force.

We used our pool of mystery shoppers and interviewers to conduct over 500 visits in Swiss pharmacies. The visits revealed significant differences among the measured criteria. The main driver was the sales channel (the chain of pharmacies) and the region. Especially the later results was surprising and allowed for a better management of the local partners.

 

Based on the results we could identify several measures to improve performance, which we discussed with the client in workshops. In order to monitor the effect of the measures, the mystery visits were repeated in regular intervals.