The new pharmacy marketing

Lately, every time I walk into a pharmacy, I get the same feeling as when I stop at an Autogrill, Italy’s highway rest-stop chain, for a coffee: there’s an almost mandatory route through the shelves, deals flash near the checkout, and even supplements have their own “impulse buy” corner. The shift has taken hold over just a few years, in Italy and abroad alike, and it’s worth tracing how we got here.

How the Bersani reform opened up the OTC market

Until the early 2000s, the Italian pharmacy was an almost unchanging institution: a tall counter, products kept behind the pharmacist, discounts capped and identical for every customer. The first jolt came with the so-called Storace decree, which introduced a controlled discount of up to 20% on non-prescription medicines. But it was the 2006 Bersani reform that truly rewrote the rules: it allowed OTC drugs to be sold outside pharmacies too, as long as a pharmacist was present, and it removed the discount cap entirely. That’s how parapharmacies were born, and large retail chains entered the drug market for the first time. In 2012, the Monti reform extended free discounts to prescription-only category C medicines as well. The outcome, though, turned out less dramatic than expected: traditional pharmacies still hold over 90% of the market, parapharmacies capture only 4-5%, and large retailers stay under 4%. The rules changed a great deal, but shoppers kept favouring their trusted neighbourhood store.

From counter service to open shelves: the new store layout

What deregulation failed to shift in market share, retail design shifted instead. Pharmacies have adopted category management techniques borrowed from supermarkets: high-margin items and new arrivals placed at eye level, seasonal campaigns on end-of-aisle displays, small formats and accessories right next to the till. In France, where parapharmacies are a well-established phenomenon, merchandising has become a discipline in its own right: aisle width, shelf height, and themed zones for dermo-cosmetics, maternity, or hair care all guide the eye and turn a visit into a guided experience rather than a quick stop for an urgent remedy. In Italy, retail media in pharmacies is now worth over 640 million euros, spanning digital screens, proximity marketing, and systems that track engagement in front of the display unit. It’s no surprise that supplement sales jump 20% in August, or that dermo-cosmetics rise 43% in December: seasonality has become as much a matter of commercial planning here as it is for any supermarket.

The American model: when the drugstore turns lifestyle brand

In the United States, the shift arrived earlier and went further. Chains like CVS and Walgreens have built entire private-label ecosystems that, by some estimates, account for up to 25% of sales in the store’s “front end,” the part furthest from the pharmacy counter. Walgreens launched its Nice! food line, CVS relaunched its own Gold Emblem brand with premium variants, and Rite Aid built a whole architecture of sub-brands for home, wellness, and personal care. There have even been celebrity partnerships in beauty, spanning cosmetics to high-end vitamins. The American drugstore, in short, stopped being just a place to fill a prescription a long time ago: it became a lifestyle store that, among other things, also sells medicine.

The pharmacy UX project I never got to run

Here’s where this gets personal. A couple of years ago, a major American consumer pharma company hired me for a user experience project focused exactly on Italian pharmacies: understanding how customers move between shelves, what they’re looking for, what makes them stop in front of one display rather than another. It was tailor-made for my interests, blending behavioural observation with experience design. Then, following a deprioritisation decided further up the chain, the project was cancelled before it even started. I admit I took it rather hard: I would have loved it, and even now, whenever I find myself stuck in front of an aftershave display arranged suspiciously like the crisps at an Autogrill, I think back to that brief that never got written.

What’s next for pharmacy marketing

The global self-care market, according to the latest analyses, is growing at a rate of 6.4% a year, with Europe remaining the largest region and set to outpace the average even further. It’s a clear signal: pharmacies, in Italy and elsewhere, are turning into a hybrid channel between health, wellbeing, and everyday consumption, not unlike how wine had to reinvent its own communication for a more demanding and informed audience. And much like the small adjustments packaged-goods brands make to their products, changes in pharmacies often stay invisible to shoppers until they stop and actually check their receipt. Next time you walk into a pharmacy just for a pack of plasters and walk out with three extra items, don’t blame bad luck: there’s a well-executed category management strategy behind it.

A Sophie Kinsella novel about pharmacy shopping?

After so much time spent watching shelves and shopping paths, a less serious but no less genuine idea came to mind: I could write a novel about it, in the style of the late Sophie Kinsella, who passed away in December 2025. The title, obviously, would be “I Love Shopping in the Pharmacy.” The heroine could fall for supplement promotions instead of shoes, and the third chapter’s existential crisis could unfold in front of a wall of anti-ageing face serums on a buy-two-get-one-free deal. After all, if pharmaceutical marketing learned so much from mass retail, why shouldn’t a romance novel learn something from pharmacy shelves?

My last trip to the pharmacy

One true story, to close things off: the last time I walked into a pharmacy, I was after eye drops for my son’s conjunctivitis. A self-styled doctor from a well-known aesthetics lab suddenly grew concerned about the visible discolouration on my face, and I walked out with almost 100 euros of products. The only effect that was actually measurable, more than on the marks themselves, was on my credit card limit.