HOW TO MAKE AN EMOTIONAL CONNECTION WITH YOUR CONSUMERS?

Emotional connection, which improves the relationship between two people, is a concept increasingly used by the company to create a lasting emotional connection from the customer to the brand. While this principle seems more obvious to implement for consumer products, it is more complex to develop for health and well-being companies with patients and pharmacy customers. How can we act when the customer's relationship is more distant, and expectations regarding products are more difficult to measure?

The best way is to establish an emotional connection with the pharmacy teams who will extend it to their customers. Each team member acts as a relay, a prescriber, an ambassador for a brand and its products.

What is an emotional connection?

Emotional marketing aims to establish, between a brand and its consumers, a relationship beyond the rational arguments of packaging, price, method of administration, dosage, effectiveness tests, etc. The connection, known as emotional, is stronger and more lasting than a traditional relationship: a relationship of trust, of complicity with patients and final consumers, a reliable and quasi-affective attachment, which favors the act of purchasing.

This approach goes beyond advertising or storytelling. It is about paying attention to patients, listening to them, understanding them to make the brand genuinely memorable, to get patients instinctively turn to it, as if by reflex, for their health or wellness needs.

Manufacturing Secrets

The first lever to become a partner brand for your consumers' health and well-being is your products' perfect expertise to guide them towards the options and choices best suited to their needs. That involves tailored training on each product, their prescriptions, and their benefits for pharmacy professionals. This training must also be consistent across the entire product range of the brand. Indeed, the emotional connection with your brand will be reinforced if patients become aware that their pharmacist, and your brand, can support them on several "verticals", in other words, at different key moments of their health and well-being journey.

For example, the pharmacist must inform the final consumer that, for his vacations, he can provide him with the "essential oil" product he already knows, but also sunscreen, a mosquito repellent, a hair lotion, an after-sun balm, ... The emotional connection takes place. As if "wrapped" in a cocoon of confidence, he is charmed by the ability to advise, to take care of himself at different moments of his daily life. The client is freed from a mental workload, no longer hesitates about which brand to choose, instinctively attracted by yours. He is in full confidence.

This approach can only be successful if the training we are talking about creates product masters among the pharmacy professionals. These automatisms allow them to dedicate their attention to the customer's needs in a truly empathetic way. If the brand's emotional connection is established with the pharmacy professionals, it means that the training has been successful.

The second leverage is based on the brand's marketing operations knowledge around its products ranges: promotions, animations at the point of sale, couponing actions, special operations on the website, audiovisual advertising, social networks, ...

Developing the feeling of a dynamic brand that continuously launches particular actions creates a permanent presence in the pharmacy.

At the heart of the pharmacy, challenge actions motivate the pharmacy professionals to achieve sales targets. With the challenge, we are in the register of the game, of gamification. It's an internal competition within a pharmacy, a match between the same pharmacy employees, where the objective is to become the best advisor of your products over a given period.

What about CRM in all this?

To move the pharmacy staff towards a more emotional connection with the end customer, the CRM of the pharmaceutical sales representative must be the driving force and guarantor of the mechanisms of this progression.

The intelligent Pharma CRM solution is, above all, an excellent sales support tool. It allows you to monitor all operations carried out with pharmacy staff, to measure their effectiveness, and to include them in a dynamic of continuous improvement! The CRM must offer coherent progress plans: product training, events, challenges, merchandising actions to highlight your products. All these actions must be monitored and involve the pharmacy employees as much as possible to assume their role as permanent brand ambassadors fully.