Customer-focused ad campaign marks return to basics of service

Although Rite Aid has been putting up stronger numbers of late, posting an annual profit for the first time in more than five years, as well as a positive first quarter last month, the chain is by no means out of the woods yet.

At least that's the message president and chief executive officer Mary Sammons, along with a troupe of senior Rite Aid executives, delivered to district managers and department heads across the chain's 19 regions earlier this year. In a sense, Sammons told the employees to be proud of their accomplishments, but warned them not to mistake the forest for the trees and not to forget the one promise most responsible for fueling Rite Aid's turnaround: personalized attention to customer service.

Indeed, Rite Aid is keeping its focus on the basics now that the chain has flipped its profit switch from red to black, and the basics for Rite Aid funnel back to its original "With us it's personal" tag line.

To Rite Aid, it's not a slogan; it's a way of doing business. "[With us it's personal] isn't an ad campaign. It isn't a short-term promotion," emphasized John Learish, Rite Aid's senior vice president of marketing. "'With us it's personal' is really an attitude--the way we approach business. It's how we approach our customers."

However, it is exactly that emphasis on personalized customer service that Rite Aid will be communicating to consumers this fall when it kicks off a major television ad campaign for the first time in three years.

"The marketing campaign is going to include a combination of outdoor ads, circular ads, point-of-sale [signage] in store, health brochures and TV," Sammons told a roomful of shareholders last month. "It's fully integrated, and it's all going to be saying the same thing. This campaign is really geared at looking at [the drug store shopping experience] from the customer's point of view and saying [Rite Aid] is here to help."

Because with us, it is personal, she noted.

"Instead of going out and telling customers all the things we do to deliver the experience, what we're doing is taking a different role and ... acknowledging what the customer wants, being empathetic to their needs and positioning Rite Aid as a solution to those needs," Learish said.

The six-month-long television blitz, which will begin next month, is designed to create some synergy between Rite Aid's front-end consumer and the chain's pharmacy patient. Indeed, according to ACNielsen data Rite Aid provided, about 25 percent of all U.S. households shopped at a Rite Aid last year, but not all of them shopped both the pharmacy and the front end of the store.

The campaign marks the second arena in which Rite Aid is looking to rejoin its competitors--first new store development and now televised advertising. "It's one of the places that over the last four and a half years, we really haven't had the money to invest," Sammons said. And that placed Rite Aid at a disadvantage versus competitors who were able to deliver a pharmacy message to a broad-based audience. "We're going to continue to do this as we move forward through the next few years," Sammons told shareholders.

The campaign will feature day-part and prime-time spot buys from local affiliates, typically during newscasts. "From a topical standpoint, this message is going to be focused on pharmacy--a more serious message--and news provides for an [appropriate] environment to broadcast such a message," Learish said.

The TV ad spots will be placed in 33 major Rite Aid markets, representing 74 percent of the chain's pharmacy sales--"markets like Los Angeles and New York," Learish noted, listing a number of other big urban markets where Rite Aid has a strong presence, including Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Pittsburgh.

"Obviously, what we would love to be able to do is to run chainwide television to support all of our stores and markets," Learish added. But in an effort to deliver the biggest impact and still be fiscally responsible, Rite Aid analyzed all of its options. And that included the possibility of launching a Walgreens-es-que media buy across national cable--a strategy that would have provided a broader reach, but without heavy penetration into Rite Aid's core markets, Learish noted. "When we looked at the media delivery, the best option for us was to concentrate on our biggest markets--markets that contribute the largest percentage of sales for the total chain and really go deeper with the buy ... [buying] heavier weight in fewer markets," he said.

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