Pharmacy-led health and beauty strategy
Boots is the largest pharmacy chain in Europe with an excellent reputation for differentiated health and beauty products and customer care. Our strategy is to develop Boots into the world’s leading pharmacy-led health and beauty retail brand, focused on helping people look and feel their best.
The key steps we are taking in the UK to execute our strategy are:
Making Boots more convenient and accessible for our customers. The roll-out of the ‘your local Boots pharmacy’ branded format was completed before Christmas 2009 with around 1,000 pharmacies trading under this format. We plan to further increase the number of Boots stores through new openings and pharmacy acquisitions and have also just commenced a trial with Waitrose to sell selective product ranges in each other's stores. During the year we commenced the re-branding of Dollond & Aitchison which will double the number of Boots Opticians practices.
Developing our people to be at their very best for our customers. In addition to improving the product knowledge of our people through weekly e-learning sessions, we are continuing to run a comprehensive leadership development programme and a Boots commercial academy, both aimed at ensuring that we have the best people supporting and developing our customer offering. We continue to recruit and train a substantial number of graduate pharmacists.
Improving our customers’ in-store shopping experience by consistently providing best in class customer care and service. This is being partly achieved by operating efficient walk-in prescription services staffed by friendly, knowledgeable and accessible pharmacists, and faster till service. Our customers’ experiences have most recently been further enhanced by better in-store product availability following the investment in a more efficient logistics network, refitted stores, and redesigned store layouts to make it easier for customers to find what they want. We are also differentiating our retail formats and product offering to better meet our customers’ needs.
Creating a compelling multi-channel health and wellbeing consumer offering. We continue to develop boots.com to make it easier for our customers to use. ‘Order-on-line collect-in-store’ is now available in more than 2,000 Boots stores across the UK, providing customers with convenient access to the extended Boots product range, including the full seasonal gift ranges. In October 2009, we launched BootsWebMD, our consumer health and wellness information portal, in partnership with WebMD, the leading US healthcare portal.
Increasingly differentiating our product offering. We are achieving this by enhancing our ranges of leading consumer and specialist health and beauty brands. In addition, we are increasing the rate of product innovation for our own market leading brands, such as No7, and launching new and enhanced own brand and ‘only at Boots’ exclusive product ranges and services, such as the Tony Ferguson Weightloss Programme, in conjunction with brand partners.
Continuing to provide customers with excellent value by providing trusted ranges of Boots branded products, executing strong promotional offers and rewarding customer loyalty with Boots Advantage Card points.
The key steps we are taking in our International health and beauty markets to execute our strategy are:
Opening new stores in markets where Boots is already well established, including the Republic of Ireland and Norway.
Developing country specific Boots branded trading formats to meet local needs, including completing the roll out of the successful ‘Boots apotek’ pharmacy concept in Norway. We have also extended our test of the ‘Boots apotheek’ pharmacy concept in The Netherlands and are evaluating franchising opportunities in other countries. In addition we will consider, over time, establishing Boots pharmacy chains in new countries where legislation permits and it makes economic sense to do so.
