CVS' Actions Exemplify the Potential of Insights

Perhaps the loudest shot fired across the retail landscape in 2014 was the decision made by CVS Health to end the sale of tobacco and related products in the company’s 7,800 CVS/pharmacy stores nationwide. The move has raised its fair share of questions, from multiple layers of “How?” and “Why?” to “What’s next for drugstore retail?”Attendees of the Shopper Marketing Summit this month will learn the answers when Judy Sansone, CVS Health’s senior vice president of merchandising and personalization, shares the stage with Wendy Liebmann, chief executive officer of WSL/Strategic Retail. Their general session address entitled “How Shopper Insights Are Transforming U.S. Health Care Retailing” will use CVS’ removal of tobacco products as an example to demonstrate how retailers can draw on customer insights to make bold transformational decisions.“WSL has been a great partner to CVS for so many years,” Sansone says, “providing a kind of outside-in view of the marketplace and consumer trends. This presentation is an opportunity to talk about connecting to the wellness trend, showcasing our tobacco-removal decision and how customer insights are helping us further evolve into a trusted health care brand.”CVS is well-known in the industry for developing an insights-rich customer loyalty program, and the company has a strong record of bringing those insights to action. Liebmann’s 25-year-old consultancy is also widely regarded for insights-based work such as its ongoing “How America Shops” research. One recent study drills deeply into the current consumer wellness trend and uses insights into how shoppers perceive drugstores to help build a vision for the future of health care retail.“I was in awe of the bold decision CVS made to stop selling cigarettes,” Liebmann says. “It addressed a key learning we saw in our research that shoppers were not as trusting of drugstores to deliver credible health information as many may have thought. CVS directly confronted the issue of trust with this move, and so I proposed to Judy that this [Summit presentation] would be a great platform for us to share how we both used insights to identify and address a major strategic shift.”For WSL’s part, the insights came directly from the “How America Shops Wellness Uprising” study, conducted in 2014. Among the key findings are that today’s shoppers use a broad range of resources and retailers to care for their health and that of their families; stress is their primary health concern; and many of them demand that retailers and brands earn their trust when it comes to health and wellness products.“We saw numerous macro trends transforming the way shoppers viewed – or could potentially view – health and wellness,” says Liebmann. “We were eager to understand how shoppers of all demographics viewed the trends, were dealing with them every day; how they fit into their broader lifestyle – or not; and, ultimately, the implications for retailers, CPG and many other categories.”CVS, meanwhile, has access to its own set of customer data from which to glean actionable insights. “Our loyalty program has provided us with more than 16 years of customer insights that is unmatched in the industry,” Sansone says, “and WSL has helped us to complete that view and look ahead to where the customer is going. The integration of our health and pharmacy services, our evolving front-store offerings, our digital tools and solutions, and our focus on personalization is a culmination of the feedback we receive from customers, patients and clients.”The Summit presentation will cover the retailer’s emerging strategies more specifically, as well as the insights upon which they were built and that led to the elimination of tobacco products. It will also provide new insights from the WLS study into how American shoppers think about their health and wellness, what influences the categories they buy and how and where they shop.“My hope,” Sansone says, “is that people will come away with an understanding of how our tobacco decision helped launch our new purpose-driven CVS Health brand, and how we are responding to insights that customers now expect more from us as a health care company.”

CVS' Actions Exemplify the Potential of Insights

P2PI MEMBERS

JOIN P2PI

Company

Market Segment