Pharmacy Market Research Consultancy

In 2005, the senior consultant from Pharmacy Consulting Ltd (PCL) read about an anti-counterfeiting technology trial that had just been conducted in a small number of UK pharmacies by Aegate Ltd, at that time owned by PA Consulting Ltd. Following an expression of interest by PCL in this work, a meeting was arranged between the sole pharmacist at Aegate and the senior consultant from PCL. This meeting lead on to PCL working with Aegate for 4 years to help support the development and adoption of their technology both in the UK and in various European countries.

The Pharmacy Consulting solution

Over a period of years a number of projects were performed including arranging and hosting:

• a visit of Aegate software developers to a UK community pharmacy
• a visit for an Aegate executive to a busy European pharmacy
• a visit to the President of the Belgian equivalent of the RPSGB
• visits to various UK suppliers with whom Aegate would need to work to launch their service

plus

• researching the market opportunities for the Aegate technology in two specific European countries

The customer benefits

The involvement of the senior consultant from PCL with Aegate Ltd allowed the customer to rapidly identify and access senior people they needed to influence concerning the launch of their new service, both in the UK and in the EU

When assessing the state of readiness of other European markets for the Aegate service, the research undertaken by PCL on two specific markets rapidly gave the necessary background to prioritise their future country by country investment strategy.

A South African company approached Pharmacy Consulting Ltd (PCL) to ask for help to identify key UK companies, using its unbiased UK market knowledge, which they would need to work with in order to launch their service in the UK.

They later asked PCL to obtain appointments with Director level contacts in as many of those suppliers as possible and to accompany them to those meetings to make the introductions and to offer support and advice.

The Pharmacy Consulting solution

As PCL’s reputation is based upon maintaining good working contacts with a variety of pharmacy market suppliers at senior level and never waste their time, PCL asked the customer to first host a visit from the senior PCL consultant in their home country. The objective here was for the senior consultant to both verify the claims made about the service being provided in South Africa and also to judge whether a similar service could/would work in the UK.

Once the above had been satisfactorily completed, PCL agreed to set up and host a series of meetings with UK suppliers that the customer needed to work with. No supplier refused to allow a meeting with PCL’s clients, and the meetings all proceeded smoothly.

Customer benefits

The customer was able to get to meet all the influential suppliers with whom they would need to work to launch their service in the UK, within a 2 week period. This meant that the MD from SA could come over to the UK for a defined and relatively short period. Even though the customer’s service was quite revolutionary for the UK market, the fact that PCL were able to reassure UK suppliers that this model truly worked in SA, played its part in gaining sufficient interest from UK suppliers to want to hear about the proposed new service.

The senior consultant from Pharmacy Consulting was briefed upon our requirement to rapidly gain quite a detailed understanding of the state of development of the community pharmacy market in two European countries.

The work was completed on time and to budget and fully met our expectations. The consultant also helpfully kept us in the picture as to how things were progressing whilst the work was in progress and in the case of one country even arranged and hosted a visit for one of our team to visit a typical busy pharmacy in that country where the owner/pharmacists spoke English.