Patronage patterns of the pharmacy consumers: a segmentation study in Greece

Theodoridis, C and Boutsouki, C (2017) Patronage patterns of the pharmacy consumers: a segmentation study in Greece. In: 5th International Conference on Contemporary Marketing Issues (ICCMI) 2017, 21 June 2017 - 24 June 2017, Thessaloniki, Greece.

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Abstract

Pharmacy retailing is still being the only legal distribution channel for medicines in Greece however there is evidence that the deregulation of the distribution is imminent to happen and therefore knowledge on the how the consumers that use pharmacies are choosing among the already vastly congested competition. The density of the pharmacies in Greece is among the highest in the EU (Theodorakis, 2013) and this comes to an agreement with the reputation Greeks have to be very reliant to the healthcare providers. Never the less, the per capita expenditure on healthcare from 2009 to 2013 has decreased by a total of 21% (OECD, 2015) and this is reflected on the sales of pharmacies that declined that much that pharmacists struggle to keep them open (Karagiorgos, 2015). This paper considers what are the market segments in the market and what are the differences between the loyal and the random pharmacy consumers.