How The Right Nutritional Brand Can Boost Your Nutritional Practice

You often hear about building your own brand, but what about the brands that make-up your business? If you sell products, this can be a big deal and a tremendous tool to retain your customers and prevent them from being hi-jacked.

Let’s take wellness for instance; I like to focus on four main areas to build a successful wellness practice:

• Building Culture
• Optimizing Communication and Marketing
• Congruency in Values of Health and Wellness
• Competency- can’t just ‘do’ wellness through merchandising and having a ‘Dr. Oz recommends’ section.

So, if you, yourself are the brand, you must certainly have a strong base of competency. The brands that you carry can play a very big role in this as well.

In my pharmacy I had three to four main nutritional companies I utilized: Pure, Thorne, Premier Research Laboratories, and Metabolic maintenance- I sold others, but these were my core 4, I had my reasons, and as you can tell, they all promote hypoallergenic, no toxic fillers, and vegetable capsules in all cases when possible.

Now, I grew into these brands because I loved the culture that they built- their ‘reason why’, what they stood for, their non-compromising standards- plus, this offered me additional ways of promotion.

When I started out though, the only branding I was caught up in was “pharmaceutical grade,” and I would go through the nutritional wholesalers to find “the best quality at the best price” for my customers- and I even used this saying.

I was shooting myself in the foot, and as my practice grew, PRL was the company I would recommend off of kinesiology consults, Pure was my go to point and shoot, and Thorne and Metabolic maintenance filled in with some of their unique products, and from this point I did not vary much.

People really dug it, people fall in love with brands, and it became that way with these nutritional companies.I didn’t realize how important brand identity was- and if you look back to a series of emails/posts I did a few months ago with the cultural creatives, you will find that people align brands and values. Something else I have been seeing more often which falls in line with this is people actually researching a particular brand- after a recommendation, before or after a purchase, they go home to research the company- this used to be to price shop on the internet, but more and more I am seeing that they want to know more about the company itself.

What made me write this, was an email that came from a former client of mine, she was asking for an alternative to her allergy medications, I forwarded her to a local pharmacy that carries Pure and gave her recommendations. Her reply was “Thanks for that alternative to flonase info, Rob! How can I not try it… Especially since it’s a Pure product which I love. I’ll pick some up next time I’m at _____ Pharmacy.”

And what really makes this work is that the values of the pharmacy and the values of Pure are in strong alignment- customers get it, and feel its way more than just selling merchandise.

I have been recently working a lot with an organization which they wanted to go with one brand, for ease of accounting, realizing discount savings on ordering, and where I initially thought that would be a strong limitation- its actually working quite well on all levels. We have 2 items in their whole inventory not from this company, a progesterone cream (which they do not make) and a high dose iodine/iodide/whole food supplement.

The result, people are ditching their traditional brands to try the products from the line that they are carrying- this is based off of alignment of values, trust, and expertise- a winning combination! Heck, even local docs are getting involved, conventional, old fashion docs recognizing the professional way this pharmacy is going about nutrition.

If you are in the same boat as I was years ago, finding the best quality at the best price- consider a new formula- research some of the top lines that stand behind quality, integrity and research. Go as far as to research their online presence, how does their message come across to the consumer. Hopefully your customer will get a feeling of professionalism and quality, and understand why you stand behind that brand.

Look at what they have to offer, and see that their values align with yours. People ask me why I use Pure in a lot of my examples, in addition to some other companies- its simple- our values align- I even make it a point to donate to the charities that they do, because I believe a quality supplement is job one, but it goes so much further than that- we in our profession have the ability to make some real serious change.