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50 CPD ACTIVITY GETTING BACK TO THE NEW NORMAL Shannon Kerr MBA As a marketer and project manager with more than 20 years’ experience, Shannon has focused on the community-pharmacy space for the past 10 years. Shannon’s experience encompasses branding, digital marketing, loyalty programs, above the line and retail marketing. Her project skills enable a coherent and integrated message across all elements of pharmacy marketing. Shannon Kerr works at instigo. For the purposes of full disclosure, instigo has a commercial relationship with the Pharmacy Guild of Australia to deliver the Health Advice Plus program into community pharmacy. Instigo also provides a range of business services to API including some marketing services, professional services coaching for Soul Pattinson and Pharmacist Advice stores and outsourced merchandising resources for Soul Pattinson, Pharmacist Advice and Club Premium. LEARNING OBJECTIVES: After completing this CPD activity, pharmacists should be able to: • Describe how the COVID-19 pandemic may change consumers into the future. • Describe how pharmacists can adapt their businesses in order to better serve these changes in consumers. • Describe approaches to communication during a crisis. 2016 Competency Standards: 2.3, 2.4, 4.6. Accreditation number: A2007RP4 (exp: 30/06/2022). While we all know that the direct threat of the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, with easing of restrictions across Australia comes a change in focus for pharmacy operations. From an initial period marked by a need to urgently and immediately respond to a community in a state of panic, to a period of ‘operational catch-up and adaptation’, we now need to move into a ‘business building’ phase. This phase will need to incorporate the three key areas of operations: retail, dispensary and professional services, and marketing and communication. Also key is understanding what’s happening with consumers and their mindset, in order to market and engage with customers and ensure survival and growth under completely new trading conditions. An interesting piece of research from Italian insights agency Beyond Research, ‘Post Covid-19: A brand blueprint for the future’1, indicates that the initial response to the pandemic moved from recognition and acknowledgement to a response that can be identified as the management of fear, almost like stages of grief or similar frameworks that plot the typical psychological responses to different situations. This ‘management of fear’ has become the centre of many people’s reality, demonstrably affecting key life dimensions, including time, space and personal identity. The changes across each of these dimensions, and their effect on consumer behaviour, have interesting implications for brands and businesses and how they can start to adapt and build business and communication plans that meet new societal needs. The Beyond Research study indicates that customers seek to manage their recently heightened fear in different ways, through either acknowledging or denying it, or fighting or fleeing from it – a correlation with the human ‘fight or flight’ response. These fear states are leading to the rise of several new consumer archetypes (with a corresponding role for brands to meet the needs that form from the archetypes). Such archetypes aren’t evenly distributed in the populace. From the research, the following are explanations of the emerging consumer archetypes: The Innocent Victim These people feel as if they have no control over the situation. They tend to feel lonely and be overwhelmed by worry. Pharmacies naturally cater to Innocent Victims, RETAIL PHARMACY • JUL 2020 1 CPD CREDIT