Allergy Care Brand: Walgreens Launch on the Spring Allergy Calendar
Allergy season hits the calendar twice. Spring tree-pollen in March, fall ragweed in August. The brand needed Walgreens placement before March, with pharmacist training in place to drive recommendation through the four-week peak window.
Growth in Conversions
Allergy care brand entering Walgreens US needed national planogram placement plus pharmacist education to drive recommendation during allergy season.
Content Optimization
MOART negotiated 3-SKU placement across Walgreens national footprint, ran a pharmacist education tour with sampling kits, and executed seasonal feature windows.
Organic Traffic
1682%
Dramatic Increase
Project Overview
Walgreens' OTC allergy category is locked. J&J, Bayer, and GSK incumbents own end-cap and pharmacist recommendation. An emerging brand can list. But list-without-recommendation in allergy means the SKU dies on shelf, because shoppers ask the pharmacist for guidance during the four-week peak. The brand had a differentiated formulation. What it didn't have was pharmacist credibility.
Execution
The strategy hinged on the pharmacist recommendation flywheel. We ran three parallel workstreams: OTC monograph compliance review against Walgreens' supplier standards (9 months of regulatory work pre-listing); a 14-region pharmacist training program running January through February with sampling kits placed at pharmacy counters before the March peak; and 4 seasonal feature windows aligned to spring (March-May) and fall (August-October) allergy cycles. Vendor onboarding ran on the WAG portal in parallel.
Project Results
82% set completion across 7,892 Walgreens stores by the spring launch window across 3 SKUs. Pharmacist sampling kits placed at 4,127 pharmacy counters before peak pollen. Recommendation-rate data from the 14-region training program drove a Year Two end-cap negotiation that the incumbents had held for the prior six years.
Conclusion
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