Plenty of community pharmacies stock private-label medicines. Far fewer treat them as a commercial portfolio to be managed. When Isaac Awulu walked into Mekason Pharmacy in September 2021 as its new Strategy and Operations Manager, that distinction became the basis of his work.

Isaac’s read on the business was that the pharmacy’s private-label pharmaceutical range was contributing less than it could. The obstacle, he concluded, was not supply. The products were available. They were losing to something harder to dislodge: established brand names and the purchasing habits customers had already formed around them.

Adoption, in other words, was the commercial problem and adoption is a question about customers, not shelves. Isaac built his strategy accordingly, developing a customer-segmentation and data-driven commercialization approach designed to find the buyers most open to private-label products and turn that insight into targeted sales activity.

Over the course of the initiative, Mekason Pharmacy’s revenue increased by 20%.

Segmentation before selling
Isaac started with behavior rather than with a sales target. He examined how customers were actually buying and what they actually needed, and used that to break a single undifferentiated customer base into distinct segments some with clear potential for private-label adoption, some without.

That distinction did the heavy lifting. Instead of pushing the same pitch across the whole customer base, Isaac could concentrate effort where private-label products stood the best chance of gaining traction, and build the approach around customer needs, purchasing behavior, and product value.

“Before Isaac introduced the segmentation approach, we were largely offering the same products in the same way to every customer. He helped us identify where the real opportunities were and gave the team a much clearer way to recommend our private-label medicines.
— Maureen Madubueze- Managing Director, Mekason Pharmacy

A segmentation model that lives in a spreadsheet changes nothing. Isaac worked directly with pharmacy staff and cross-functional colleagues to convert the analysis into something usable at the counter: targeted product recommendations and a clearer framework for recognizing an appropriate private-label opportunity during a customer interaction.

He did not hand the plan off. Isaac coordinated its implementation himself, tying the commercial approach to the operational realities that would determine whether it worked product availability, and the engagement of the frontline team who would have to carry the conversation.

Closing the loop with analytics
The element that distinguished the initiative was measurement. Isaac introduced service-line analytics to track how the private-label push was performing rather than judging it, as most pharmacies would, by whether overall sales happened to be up.

That change let him monitor product-line performance and customer adoption separately, see which segments were responding, and feed those findings back into the commercial approach. The result was a continuous cycle:

Customer behavior → Segmentation → Targeted engagement → Private-label adoption → Performance analytics → Commercial refinement

The distinction mattered to Isaac. His aim was never a run of individual private-label sales, but a repeatable method one that could surface customer opportunities and then prove whether they were converting into sustained performance.

“I wanted to know whether the private-label strategy was actually changing customer behavior, not just whether total sales were going up. Measuring it separately gave us a way to see what was working, refine the approach, and build something the pharmacy could repeat rather than rely on individual sales,” says Isaac Awulu.

What the 20% demonstrated
The headline outcome is straightforward: revenue at Mekason Pharmacy rose 20% over the period of the initiative. The more instructive outcome is what produced it structured segmentation and analytics, applied to private-label pharmaceuticals, generating a measurable return in a setting where such tools are rarely deployed. The initiative also widened the pharmacy’s revenue base, strengthening the role of private-label products in a portfolio that had leaned on conventional dispensing.

Isaac’s involvement spanned the entire commercialization chain rather than a single stage of it. He identified the opportunity, analyzed the customer base, designed the segmentation approach, coordinated implementation, engaged cross-functional teams, and stood up the analytics that measured the result activities that, in smaller healthcare organizations, usually sit in different hands when they are handled deliberately at all.

The relevance of the method extends past a single pharmacy, and the reason is structural. In Nigeria, a large share of health spending is paid out of pocket at the point of care, and community pharmacies are frequently the first and sometimes the only point of contact between a patient and the health system. Price is therefore not a marketing variable. It helps determine whether a course of treatment is bought at all, or bought in part.

That is the context in which private-label medicines matter nationally. Where a private-label product is clinically appropriate and materially cheaper, moving a customer to it is not only a margin decision for the pharmacy; it is an affordability decision for the patient. Isaac’s segmentation model makes that match deliberate rather than accidental directing substitution toward the customers it actually fits, and using analytics to verify that it held.

Applied across a fragmented retail pharmacy sector that largely operates without formal commercial analytics, the approach points at two outcomes at once: financially more durable independent pharmacies, and wider patient access to lower-cost medicines.

Segmentation, targeting, product positioning, adoption analysis and performance measurement are usually associated with multinational pharmaceutical companies and their budgets. Isaac’s work at Mekason is evidence that the principles are portable and that a community pharmacy in Cross River can use them to change what it sells, what it earns, and what its customers can afford.