Focus on Value, and Growth Will Follow

In today’s publishing industry, focus is the key to success. An astute publisher finds a niche market with a need, gets to know its customers and investors, and provides them with the value they seek. If value is delivered, the readers, page views, and sponsorship should follow, because word about value—or lack of it—travels at the speed of social media.

Conversely, a focus on numbers, instead of value, is how health care and big government often fail us. How much money was saved? How many prescriptions were filled? Institutions and organizations live and die by the answers to these short-sighted questions while missing the most important question for long-term sustainability and growth: how much value are we providing to our customers?

Businessman Gary Vaynerchuk describes it well: "When I hear people debate the ROI [return on investment] of social media? It makes me remember why so many business[es] fail. Most businesses are not playing the marathon. They’re playing the sprint. They’re not worried about lifetime value and retention. They’re worried about short-term goals."

Your organization may have high patient turnover, but it won’t be sustainable without quality products and services. Patients still care about value and can easily change their pharmacy, especially these days when so many competing pharmacies are adjacent to each other.

To truly know the value we provide our customers, we need to ask them. For example, Pharmacy Times conducts monthly reader surveys and regular focus groups to learn how we can best provide you with the information you need to deliver value to your customers. The content in this Digestive Health issue has been carefully tailored to you and your patients, with topics including probiotics, opioids and constipation, gastroesophageal reflux disease, and nausea and vomiting.

It is always a pleasure for the Pharmacy Times team to learn that it is on track in providing pharmacists with the value they seek. So we are pleased to announce that Pharmacy Times outranked all competitors in Average Issue Readership among the total sample studied, according to the 2016 Kantar Media Pharmacy Readership Data. We couldn’t achieve this high honor without you, so we thank you and pledge to continually strive to provide you with the most useful and up-to-date information to help you in your everyday practice.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy the summer!

Mike Hennessy

Chairman and CEO