Wendy future of retail top

Renewed energy surrounds Walgreens brand

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Chief marketing officer reinforces drug chain's consumer connection

DEERFIELD, Ill. — Walgreens has always viewed itself as a customer-led organization. The guardian of that positioning in its modern manifestation is Adam Holyk.

As senior vice president and chief marketing officer, he is responsible for the company’s approach to staying in touch with the people who shop the drug chain, both in its stores and online, and maintaining effective lines of communication with them.

“We are very focused on our brand and have a lot of renewed energy around what it stands for in the market today,” says Holyk, who joined Walgreens in 2011 and assumed his current responsibilities in April. “The word that continues to come up as we look at how we’ve grown the business and developed is trust. This idea of trust is really at the core of what we do with pharmacy and how we care for patients.

Adam Holyk_Walgreens

Adam Holyk

“So, as we look to the future, we believe that there’s an opportunity for us to reinforce this positioning and really make it come to life in our brand, in our marketing and in what we offer to consumers throughout the stores. Walgreens has always been a company that’s known for caring for people in communities across America. We want to drive home the idea that we are on more than 8,000 corners that are the most accessible locations for people to get what they need to look after their families and to look after themselves.”

In many respects, Holyk is ideally equipped to maintain the consumer connection for Walgreens. His first assignment at the company was divisional vice president in charge of creating the Balance Rewards loyalty program, which today has 87 million active users.

“When you look at the history of the company going back to the beginning with founder Charles Walgreen, there’s always been this relentless focus on customers and treating them like they’re guests,” notes Holyk, who before moving to Walgreens was a vice president at dunnhumby, a leading marketing insights and analytics firm, and Shoppers Drug Mart, where he oversaw the Canadian retailer’s loyalty program and customer marketing. “But as we grew and built the leading store network in the country, it became more difficult to truly get to a personalized understanding of the people in our stores.

“Balance Rewards was centered on two main objectives. One was how we can learn and understand more about our customers. The second was finding out how we could use the program as an effective engagement tool that enables us to retain those high-value customers by giving them value on a consistent and reliable basis.

“We’ve learned a lot as a result, but it’s still a building process. To really unlock the full potential of Balance Rewards, we ultimately need to join it up with having the most relevant and effective offer in our stores, and bring together all of those different pieces with a differentiated assortment and reliable value. Then we’ll be in a position to truly engage the customer from a loyalty perspective.”

The information generated by Balance Rewards has proven invaluable as the drug chain works to sharpen its focus on the stated purpose of its parent company, Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. (WBA), to help people live healthier and happier lives.

“We’re a pharmacy-led health and well-being retailer, so more and more our core proposition will reflect that,” says Holyk, who during his tenure at the company subsequently served as group vice president of enterprise insights and data analytics, and also headed WBA’s corporate strategy development efforts for health care partnerships. “We may refine our assortment in some categories and expand the offer in such areas as health care services and optical, based on the consumers in the market and the customer
potential.”

One objective is to streamline the assortment to increase efficiency and make it easier for shoppers to find what they need quickly and easily.

Walgreens store_health and wellness“The intention is to get to a curated offer that provides simple solutions,” explains Holyk. “We believe that our brand equity lies at its heart within pharmacy, health and beauty, and our opportunity is to reinforce that. As we move away from that core into other categories, our role is actually one of how we deliver conveniences and simplicity.

“We think that Walgreens’ future is to help customers find the right solutions, and we have the experts in our stores that can do that. It starts with the pharmacy and moves into our wellness area, which includes skin care and part of cosmetics, when you think about acne and sun, and that halos back into the rest of beauty care. We’re uniquely positioned to do that in a very open and accessible way. We have this very unique combination.”

As chief marketing officer, Holyk has to persuade consumers to accompany Walgreens on its evolutionary journey. The task for him and his team is complicated by rapid changes in technology and media.

“In everything we do, we can never lose sight of our key messages,” Holyk notes. “The question is how best to deliver them. There is a definite shift among many marketers toward digital, but for us it’s more about how we optimize the message and the right media mix. That’s the effort that we’re going through right now.”

One major challenge is striking the right balance between the use of traditional mass marketing vehicles, including television advertising and print circulars, and new media alternatives that promise to address consumers on an individualized basis.

“We’re looking at how we can tighten up our brand positioning and get really clear about what we stand for, and then figure out the right medium,” he says. “We’re very interested in capitalizing on new channels that are more personalized, and more appropriate for rich content and one-to-one marketing, but at the same time we need to ensure that all of our efforts are integrated and joined up the right way.”

Citing the strength of Walgreens’ digital assets, Holyk indicates that he is particularly bullish about technology’s ability to link consumers directly with what goes on in the store.

The health care tools included in the drug chain’s mobile app provide a good example. Pharmacy patients can, among other options, order prescription refills by scanning a barcode, receive refill reminders via text message and find out where a script is in the filling process at any time.

“We do believe that there are opportunities in programmatic digital and invest in those channels,” Holyk says. “But it’s always a question of how you most effectively deliver the right message to the consumer about the role Walgreens can play in their lives.

“For instance, we could have a choice in the digital version of The New York Times of running a pop-up ad to buy a product online at Walgreens. That’s one possibility. Another option would be that we actually target a message that reminds you, when there’s a high pollen count in your specific ZIP code, that Walgreens is the trusted expert that has real solutions around allergy.

“The latter is a very effective way for us to communicate, because we are on the most convenient corners and we have a pharmacist in every store. If we can make that relevant to you at a time when we believe that there’s a high need for allergy relief, that is actually a very effective medium.”

At times Walgreens deploys digital in an attempt to create consumer interest in a product or category, he adds. At other times it is used to harness existing demand and steer people to Walgreens stores.

Holyk is insistent on viewing digital within the framework of a broader omnichannel strategy. Customers have the option of shopping online via Walgreens.com (it became the retailer’s sole e-commerce platform last year when four other sites, including drugstore.com, were shuttered), but it is just one aspect of a multifaceted, multichannel offer.

“Our vision is omnichannel more than e-commerce,” notes Holyk, “and organizationally, we’ve brought the digital and store teams for both marketing and merchandising even closer together. What we’re trying to do is make sure that we’re leveraging all of those the capabilities to help the customer choose Walgreens and get what she wants in the channel that she prefers at any given moment.

“A big part of the contribution that our digital assets can make is reinforcing the value of our stores and engaging the consumer at the right time, not necessarily transacting online.

“Within the stores, we know that our mobile app can also prompt people to purchase additional products to be either shipped to store or shipped to home. Those are both recent innovations. Last year, we expanded our ship-to-store capability, and that business has been growing significantly. We’ve seen significant customer response in a couple of months. That’s an indication that we’re addressing an unmet need and making Walgreens more relevant.”

Work is under way to keep the drug chain on that trajectory. The appointment of Holyk to his current position and Joe Hartsig to the role of senior vice president and chief merchandising officer coincided with a realignment of some duties within the two departments.

“One of the unique pieces within the new structure of the marketing organization is that we’ve not only joined up digital marketing tightly with the more traditional corporate marketing team, we’ve also brought what we call customer offer development into the group,” says Holyk. “That team is intended to drive early-stage development of how we can keep pushing our consumer offer forward.
“We’ve made it very tight with marketing, because we believe that the brand needs to lead what we can bring to consumers. The idea is to launch different experiments in different markets and see what catches fire.”

Some of those concepts, including the next iteration of the urgent care clinic model and optical centers, are currently being tested in stores.

“If we move forward, we need to think about the rest of the retail products business offered in connection with those services,” Holyk says. “With those services, you now have significantly less floor space, so you need to think about your offering and make choices around which categories you want to participate in. We work very closely with the operations group on how we rapidly develop, test and roll out these concepts.”


ECRM_06-01-22


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