Marketing
Pain and Over the Counter medicine are a harder category to market well than people assume, because the decision is rarely made by one person. A doctor may set the original diagnosis. A pharmacist, standing behind a counter with ninety seconds and a queue behind the customer, exercises real clinical judgment on what to actually hand over. And the patient, often in visible discomfort, still has to trust the recommendation enough to use it correctly at home. my industry uses to measure success, which brand a customer sees first, reaches for first, buys first. It is a real discipline, and I built years of my career on it. But share of shelf, on its own, measures nothing that matters unless it becomes something else. Winning shelf space that a doctor trusts enough to mention, that a pharmacist reaches for with confidence, and that a patient actually uses correctly once they are home, is not really about the shelf at all. It is share of whether someone ' s afternoon is spent managing pain or living through it. Share of shelf, done honestly, is share of someone ' s life.
Marketing
Kenyanito Baraka
Share Of Shelf, Share Of Life!
In 1983, Steve Jobs was trying to convince John Sculley, then the president of Pepsi, to leave a secure corner office and join a scrappy computer company still years away from proving itself. Sculley hesitated. So Jobs asked him a question that has outlived every product either man ever launched: did he want to spend the rest of his career selling flavored sugar water, or did he want to come and help change the world instead. Sculley took the job.
There is nothing lesser about selling sugar water, and I am not speaking about it from the outside. Early in my career, I spent three years and five months at The Cifars Group, first as an Area Sales Manager and later as a Commercial Manager, running route to market for Coca Cola among other portfolios. In that time we built a business from scratch to a multi-million dollar P and L within seven months and held quarterly target achievement above 105 percent quarter after quarter. I enjoyed every single bit of it.
My first real interaction with healthcare happened in that same job, almost by accident, during those three years and five months at Cifars. Alongside the soda, I was also selling Baby Blossom, a dermatology brand for eczema in infants. I did not think much of it at the time. Looking back, that was the actual beginning. From eczema I moved into pain management directly, and six years later, pain management still has not let go of me.
This is my why. My version of care shows up at the exact moment someone needs relief most, a headache, a fever, a child ' s cough, pain someone has been quietly carrying for weeks. Everything I learned building brands elsewhere, including a soft drink, has since been redirected toward that one idea. Marketing, in this corner of the profession, is not persuasion for its own sake. It is care, delivered at scale, through whatever tools a company happens to have available.
Pain and Over the Counter medicine are a harder category to market well than people assume, because the decision is rarely made by one person. A doctor may set the original diagnosis. A pharmacist, standing behind a counter with ninety seconds and a queue behind the customer, exercises real clinical judgment on what to actually hand over. And the patient, often in visible discomfort, still has to trust the recommendation enough to use it correctly at home. Winning any one of those three without the other two is not winning at all.
That is why the title of this piece is not a slogan to me. Share of shelf is the language
Pain and Over the Counter medicine are a harder category to market well than people assume, because the decision is rarely made by one person. A doctor may set the original diagnosis. A pharmacist, standing behind a counter with ninety seconds and a queue behind the customer, exercises real clinical judgment on what to actually hand over. And the patient, often in visible discomfort, still has to trust the recommendation enough to use it correctly at home. my industry uses to measure success, which brand a customer sees first, reaches for first, buys first. It is a real discipline, and I built years of my career on it. But share of shelf, on its own, measures nothing that matters unless it becomes something else. Winning shelf space that a doctor trusts enough to mention, that a pharmacist reaches for with confidence, and that a patient actually uses correctly once they are home, is not really about the shelf at all. It is share of whether someone ' s afternoon is spent managing pain or living through it. Share of shelf, done honestly, is share of someone ' s life.
Getting there means treating all three decision makers with equal seriousness, translating the same clinical evidence three different ways, for a diagnosis, for a recommendation, and for a moment of genuine relief, without losing what makes any of it safe.
At the end of the day, I live to serve the patient. Not the brand, not the target, not the shelf. The patient, who wants relief as fast as possible, so they can get back to their day, their work, their child, their life. Everything else in this job is just the mechanism for getting there faster and more reliably.
Steve Jobs asked John Sculley whether he wanted to keep selling sugar water or come and change the world. I sold sugar water too, and loved it, before I found my own answer to that same question. Every marketer eventually has to find theirs. Mine happens to live at a pharmacy counter, in the two minutes it takes someone to get relief and go back to living their day. That is my why. Every marketer needs to know theirs.
Kenyanito Baraka is the marketing manager, OTC & Pain Therapy, Sub Saharan Africa at Cipla. Kenyanito writes about pharmaceutical brand management, commercial strategy and executive leadership. You can commune with him via email at: Kenyanitobaraka @ gmail. com.
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