You may not advertise what you sell, but…

Let us begin with the insight that puts everything else in order.

A substantial share of pharmacy turnover consists of prescription-only medicines, and these may not be advertised to the public. Full stop. That is not a matter of interpretation but Articles 31 and 32 of the Therapeutic Products Act. A further share consists of self-medication, which may be advertised, but only subject to conditions that make every spontaneous Instagram story legally delicate.

And then there is the area to which practically no therapeutic-products constraints apply and about which almost nobody communicates: your own services. Vaccination, medication review, blood pressure measurement, blister packing, travel advice, emergency service, home delivery, opening hours, team, availability. General information about health and disease is permissible as long as it does not refer, directly or indirectly, to a particular medicine.

From this follows the strategy of this entire article: stop advertising products. Advertise access, competence and appointments.

The guard rails in five minutes

Before any money is spent, it is worth looking at the rules, because breaches are expensive and public. Swissmedic expressly monitors social media platforms as well.

Advertising to the public is permissible only for non-prescription medicines. Where it is permissible, the Medicinal Products Advertising Ordinance requires minimum particulars and the mandatory notice in its exact wording: «This is an authorised medicine. Seek advice from a specialist and read the package leaflet», or, for preparations without a package leaflet, the variant referring to the information on the pack. For television, cinema and electronic display boards, type size, duration and audio are regulated down to the last detail.

For digital channels, one clarification from Swissmedic is decisive: a link to the mandatory particulars is not enough. They must appear on the same page. Translated into practice, this means that an attractive product photo with a brand name in the feed, without the complete mandatory particulars in the same post, is legally problematic — even if there is a link in the comments.

Also inadmissible are superiority claims as well as testimonials and recommendations from medical and pharmaceutical laypersons. This makes the classic influencer collaboration for medicines effectively dead, while it continues to work for cosmetics, medical devices and services.

Two non-therapeutic-products topics are added to this. First, unfair competition law, which prohibits misleading and disparaging comparative advertising. Second, data protection: newsletters, loyalty cards, appointment reminders and tracking have, since the revision of the Data Protection Act, required clean consent, a privacy policy and a double opt-in.

Anyone who keeps these five points in mind can then work very freely.

Beforehand: the question that is almost never asked

Before a single channel is used, a decision has to be taken that most pharmacies find difficult: what this business stands for.

A pharmacy that wants to be equally good at everything cannot be represented in communication. «Friendly, competent, here for you» appears on every second website in the country and says precisely nothing. Whoever chooses a focus, by contrast, becomes quotable, recommendable and findable.

There is no shortage of possible focal points, and they usually emerge from what somebody on the team is already particularly good at. Travel medicine with vaccinations and country-specific advice. Dermocosmetics with skin analysis. Polypharmacy and care-home supply with blister packing. Mother-and-child expertise with breastfeeding advice. Sport and the musculoskeletal system in a municipality with many clubs. Animal health where many dogs live. Complementary medicine, where the specialist expertise is available.

The focus does not replace the full assortment; it organises the communication. It answers the question of what to post about, who to approach as a cooperation partner, which training to pay for and why somebody would drive past three closer pharmacies. Without it, marketing becomes a series of unconnected individual actions that do not reinforce one another.

A practical test: if a family doctor in the neighbourhood were asked what your pharmacy is known for, would an answer come? If not, that is the first task, not the Instagram channel.

First the channels that already belong to you

Before even a single franc flows into advertising, your own spaces should be optimised. They are free of charge and are systematically given away.

The shop window is the cheapest advertising medium in Switzerland, measured in contacts per franc, and in most pharmacies it is a product graveyard. A shop window carrying a single message, large, seasonal and with a concrete call to action, beats any display with fourteen preparations. «Tick protection: advice without an appointment» is a shop window. A stack of packs is not.

The till receipt is a medium with a hundred per cent open rate. A footer line about the next campaign, the vaccination consultation or the blood pressure check costs nothing.

The queue is advertising time that is being used up anyway. A screen, a stand at eye level, a poster next to the till: the person there is standing around anyway and is bored.

The telephone hold loop is the single most underestimated channel of all. Instead of music, the caller hears that there is a vaccination consultation.

And then the digital shop window that determines business success more than any campaign: the Google Business Profile. The overwhelming majority of local searches are aimed at opening hours, directions and availability. A fully maintained profile with correct hours including public holidays, current photos, services, posts and answered reviews brings measurably more customers than an advertisement, and it costs nothing but time. Anyone who leaves reviews unanswered gives away trust in exactly the place where customers are looking for it.

Social media: faces instead of packs

The most common mistake on pharmacy channels is the product post. It is legally delicate, interchangeable in content and algorithmically hopeless.

What works is the opposite: people, processes, seasons. Who works here, what does this person do, how is a compounded preparation made, what does the laboratory bench look like at seven in the morning, why is everybody suddenly queuing in spring because of pollen. Short videos beat pictures, pictures beat text, and regularity beats perfection.

The platform logic is banal but ignored. Instagram and TikTok reach younger people and work through faces and movement. Facebook is still the channel in Switzerland for the over-fifties, that is to say for your highest-turnover target group, and there opening hours, seasonal notices and team news work. LinkedIn is not a customer channel but a recruitment and cooperation channel, and given the shortage of skilled staff, that is currently possibly the most valuable use of all.

The simple compliance rule for all channels: talk about indications and services, not about preparations. «What to do about hay fever? Come by, we’ll look at it together» is unproblematic. A brand name with a photo of the pack drags the complete mandatory particulars along with it. And comments under your own posts should be moderated, because inadmissible statements should not be left standing there either.

Cooperations: the most underestimated lever of all

If I were allowed to recommend only one single measure to a pharmacy, it would be this one. Cooperations cost almost nothing, they cannot be copied, and they deliver qualified customers instead of reach.

The obvious partners are medical practices, physiotherapy, nutritional counselling, podiatry, home care services as well as residential and nursing homes. Access works in one direction only: you offer something instead of wanting something. Whoever offers a practice to cover fringe hours, take on compounding, organise blister packing or actively clarify alternatives during supply shortages will be recommended. Whoever brings flyers will not be recommended.

The second circle is local and barely used: fitness centres, sports clubs, running events, day-care centres, schools, the trade association, hairdressing and beauty businesses, veterinary practices. A pharmacy that staffs the first-aid post at the village run has built more trust on a single Saturday than with a year of advertisements.

The third circle is the economically most interesting: companies. Workplace health management is a real market, and the flu vaccination on company premises is the simplest way in. An afternoon at a business with forty employees brings vaccinations, contacts and a contact person for next year. From 2027 there is the added factor that vaccinations in the pharmacy are to be billable through basic insurance, which changes the calculation for such offerings.

Classic advertising: smaller, more local, more measurable

Classic advertising is not dead, it is simply used badly. For a pharmacy with a catchment area of a few kilometres, national formats are burning money, while local ones are astonishingly efficient.

The municipal bulletin, the club gazette, the gymnastics club’s programme booklet and the local newspaper reach exactly the people who can come on foot. Cinema advertising in the local cinema is cheap and actually gets watched. Posters at bus stops in the catchment area work if they carry a single statement. Direct mailings to selected neighbourhoods are expensive per contact but precise, particularly for a new opening, a refurbishment or a new service.

What is decisive with all classic formats is the thing that is almost never done in pharmacies: measurement. A coupon, a keyword, a dedicated landing page or simply the question «How did you hear about it?» during the sales conversation, consistently noted down over four weeks. Without that feedback, every decision to repeat is guesswork.

Editorial presence beats paid presence

There is a form of visibility that is more credible than any advertisement and costs less: the editorial kind.

Local newspapers, municipal bulletins and regional radio stations chronically have too little content and are constantly looking for specialists who can explain something. A pharmacist who offers twice a year to say a few sentences about the pollen count, the flu season, interactions in old age or supply shortages becomes the editorial team’s go-to contact. The third time, the editors call of their own accord.

Even more stable is a recurring column. Half a page every two months in the municipal bulletin, in plain language, without brand names, with a photo and the author’s name. That is unobjectionable under therapeutic products law, because general health information is permissible as long as it does not refer to particular medicines, and over the years it builds an authority that no advertisement can buy.

Your own events belong in the same category. An evening talk on sleep, an afternoon on the travel medicine kit before the summer holidays, an event for family carers, a tour of the laboratory for a school class. Twenty people in a room are more valuable than two thousand visual contacts, because afterwards they come back and tell others. And the effort is manageable if you bring in a cooperation partner who covers half the programme.

Digital advertising: appointments instead of products

Paid digital advertising works for pharmacies if it is kept geographically tight and aimed at an action.

Search ads are the strongest lever because they capture demand rather than creating it. Anyone searching for emergency service, vaccination without an appointment, blood pressure measurement, travel vaccination or simply an open pharmacy has an intention. A small budget on a few local search terms beats any broad campaign.

Ads on social networks are suited to seasonal topics with a clear time window and tight geography: pollen in spring, travel advice before the holidays, vaccination week in November, preparation for the first of August for pet owners.

The newsletter remains the most profitable digital instrument because it costs nothing and is repeatable. It needs a double opt-in, a clean unsubscribe option and content that is not medicine advertising. Appointment reminders for long-term medication and vaccinations by SMS or messenger are highly effective, but require explicit consent.

And one note that saves money: review management is cheaper and more effective than advertisements. Actively ask for reviews, answer all of them, including the bad ones, factually and without disclosing data.

Up- and cross-selling: completing the need, not sales pressure

This is where it gets delicate, and spring 2026 showed how quickly. When, with the new pharmacy tariff, the safety checks appeared individually on the receipt, a public accusation of rip-off arose within days. The lesson from this applies to every additional charge: it must be justifiable to the customer’s face.

Properly understood, cross-selling is nothing other than complete counselling. An antibiotic without the question about the gut is incomplete. A non-steroidal anti-inflammatory without the question about gastric protection and prior medication is incomplete. An inhaler without a demonstration of use and without a spacer for a child is incomplete. Iron without a note on timing and interactions is incomplete. A travel medicine kit without a look at the destination country is incomplete. In each of these cases, additional turnover arises as a by-product of better counselling, not as the goal.

From a business perspective it is worth tracking two key figures: the average receipt value and the number of items per receipt. Both respond sensitively to training. A sensible target is not «sell more» but «ask the appropriate additional question for defined indications», and that can be practised, aligned within the team and evaluated.

The boundary is easy to draw: if the recommendation would still be right even when the pharmacy earned nothing from it, it is fine.

Price, discount and loyalty programmes: where the line runs

Price advertising is the area with the greatest potential for error, because two areas of law converge here.

In the self-medication and open-choice area, promotions are in principle possible, but remain subject to therapeutic products advertising law. A discount on a medicine remains medicine advertising with all mandatory particulars, and advertising elements that induce excessive or unnecessary use are inadmissible. Volume discounts on painkillers are accordingly not a good idea, regardless of how well they would sell.

In the reimbursable area something different applies and is regularly overlooked: discounts obtained on purchasing must be passed on to the party owing the remuneration. The audit report of the Swiss Federal Audit Office of August 2026 gave this topic renewed attention. Anyone advertising with price advantages should therefore know exactly which pot they come from.

Loyalty programmes and customer cards, by contrast, are unproblematic as long as they relate to non-medicines or are designed purely around service, for example as a reminder service, as preferred access to appointments or as a bonus on cosmetics and open-choice items. Their real value lies in any case not in the discount but in the consent: whoever issues a card ideally obtains permission to communicate in future. This consent must be obtained cleanly in data protection terms and is worth more than any percentage point granted.

Guerrilla marketing: small, local, charming

The appeal of this discipline lies in the fact that it generates attention without consuming an advertising budget. It works when it creates genuine benefit and brings a moment of joy.

A pollen-count board on the façade, updated daily, with a number and a colour. A tick barometer in spring. A water bowl and a small dog hook in front of the door, because dog owners remember where they are welcome. A bench next to the entrance for people waiting for the bus. A shop-window note in genuine handwriting when a scarce preparation has come back in. A blood-pressure measuring day in front of the shop on market day. A visit to the kindergarten on the subject of hand washing, which is customers in ten years and generates conversations with parents today.

Two rules go with this. First: no fly-posted stickers, no posters without permission, no actions in public space without agreement with the municipality. Second: no gag that advertises medicines. As soon as a preparation is involved, therapeutic products law applies again, and guerrilla formats practically never satisfy the mandatory particulars.

The annual plan that holds it all together

The real difference between pharmacies with and without marketing success is rarely the budget. It is the question of whether somebody keeps a calendar.

A usable annual plan has exactly one focal topic per month, played across all channels: shop window, receipt, social media, newsletter, possibly a small advertisement. January resolutions and exercise, February skin in winter, March pollen, April ticks, May travel advice, June sun protection, July holiday medicine kit, August fireworks and pets, September vaccination preparation and back to school, October start of vaccination, November vaccination week, December colds and gifts.

One topic per month, one message per topic, one key figure per measure. That is unspectacular, and that is exactly why it works.

What counts in the end

A pharmacy’s scarcest resource is not the advertising budget. It is the attention actually available at the counter, and the number of people who come in every day anyway.

Nationwide that is over 300,000 contacts per day. For a pharmacy, marketing therefore means first making something of these contacts, and only afterwards buying new ones. A well-maintained Google profile, a shop window with one message, three cooperations in the neighbourhood, an annual calendar and a team that asks the right additional question for defined indications: that is the largest part of the possible effect, and it costs almost nothing.

The rest is craft. And the first thing you learn in the process is the distinction with which this text began. You may not advertise what is lying in the drawers. You may very well advertise who you are and what you can do.

That is the better offer anyway.