IRI's Times & Trends highlights new developments and critical events across all major CPG categories and channels, providing powerful benchmarking data to help guide your strategic decisions. This issue provides a detailed overview of retail healthcare marketing programs and the strong, largely untapped growth opportunities that these initiatives represent for OTC and food and beverage brands with health benefits.
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INTRODUCTION

Medicare Part D outreach. Discounted generic drugs. In-store health clinics. Retailers are increasingly investing in healthcare-based initiatives to drive store traffic, enhance customer loyalty and increase sales.

And, for good reason. Pharmacy sales are outpacing consumer packaged goods sales by a 3-to-1 ratio. Health and wellness has become a powerful driver of consumer purchase and shopping behavior, and winning in this space could well determine winners overall.

Yet, despite major strides in developing healthcare marketing strategies that work (and they are working to drive share pharmacy shifts, as detailed throughout this report), few retailers and manufacturers are fully leveraging these initiatives to drive growth across the store.

This issue of Times & Trends explores current retail marketing practices and opportunities to extend these initiatives to drive brand, category and total store growth.


KEY FINDINGS

Healthcare marketing offers a strong platform for growth across the store. Retailers are investing in healthcare marketing to capture a greater share of growing pharmacy sales; these programs offer a strong platform for driving total store growth that is not yet widely leveraged. Cross-marketing and merchandising opportunities abound for health-oriented food and beverages and over-the-counter medications within pharmacy-based retail marketing programs.

The pharmacy, OTC medications and food and beverages with disease management attributes stand to benefit from retail health clinic growth. The number of in-store health clinics is expected to double by year-end. As the majority of ailments treated within these clinics are minor, OTC remedies are poised to grow among retailers housing the clinics, as will pharmacy transactions for Rx treatments for these ailments. Health screenings for chronic conditions such as diabetes and high cholesterol also offer opportunity for targeted promotions of food and beverages with related benefits. Manufacturers should seek brand promotion opportunities with retail partners who have a strong clinic presence.

Food and beverage brands with high-demand senior health benefits should tap into Medicare Part D marketing. Aggressive Medicare Part D marketing has delivered share gains in prescriptions and healthcare products for supercenters and drug stores within the growing senior market. There is sizable upside potential for food and beverages targeting seniors with high-demand health benefits, such as reduced fat and reduced salt, as a large proportion of seniors follow specific diets to manage their health conditions. Manufacturers should explore tie-in opportunities with retailer Medicare Part D programs.
 

Source: IRI's Times & Trends Reports
Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) is the world’s leading provider of enterprise market information solutions and services to the consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail, and healthcare industries.