15 Aug
We’re excited to announce the successful pilot launch of the Haleon PharmaConnect, a Loyalty & Online Ordering Platform for Pharmacies, for the Saudi Arabia market.
Following the initial success of PharmaConnect in the UAE (United Arab Emirates), another distributor-driven market, Saudi Arabia, due to its strategic importance and growth potential in consumer healthcare, where traditional offline channels remain as a key driver of sales.
The market offers a strong opportunity to drive digital transformation, increase sales efficiency & incremental revenue by influencing channel-wide behavior via incentives and loyalty programs, rather than focusing solely on individual store growth at this stage.
Saudi Arabia hosts over 15.000 points of sale in the pharmacy and consumer healthcare vertical, making it a high-potential market for structured trade engagement. Our pilot is designed to tap into this scale: building product knowledge, strengthening brand visibility, and enabling pharmacies (B2B) place online orders of Haleon products to the distributors, powered by targeted incentives and loyalty programs.
This milestone marks the first step in rolling out a behavior-based, fully digital online ordering & loyalty experience designed to engage and reward pharmacies in a competitive sector.
Following the Saudi Arabia launch, the next big launch will be in Greece, expanding into European priority markets in Haleon’s channel strategy, while introducing new incentive mechanics, training modules and integrating with additional sales channels.
Project Overview
Challenge
Haleon operates in a vast and highly fragmented retail universe across Saudi Arabia, with thousands of pharmacies and health stores stocking both Haleon and competitor products.
- Due to a huge customer universe, direct physical coverage is inefficient & very costly, making it difficult to maintain consistent brand visibility and execution in every outlet.
- Effective engagement between retailers/customers and the company is a success driving factor.
- Digital commerce solutions are increasing the ease of doing business exponentially for both buyers and sellers
- Offline channels remain critical for driving consumer health product sales, yet these channels often lack structured ordering processes, engagement, personalized communication.
- Existing engagement relies heavily on field visits, limiting scalability and speed.
- There is a lack of integrated tools for combining commercial transactions, educational content, rewarding, gamification and in-store execution tracking in one platform.
Solution — PharmaConnect, Apex Loyalty’s Unified B2B Platform: Customer Loyalty & Digital Ordering
At Apex Loyalty, we worked with Haleon to design the right behavior-first loyalty and digital ordering program tailored to their channel engagement goals in Saudi Arabia, and brought it to life on our fully digital platform, purpose-built to execute and scale strategies like this.
Key solution elements include:
1. Loyalty & Engagement Layer
- Segmented campaigns and content tailored by outlet type and performance tier
- Rewards for achieving Perfect Store KPIs (e.g., Shelfie uploads, branded stand placements, promotional compliance)
- Gamified engagement points for platform activities & content consumption (login, quizzes, surveys, videos, training modules)
- PharmAcademy: A gamified learning module that is designed for pharmacists to help them grow their OTC business. Watch the videos to gain insights about shoppers and learn key strategies for effective merchandising.
2. Digital Ordering Layer (For Pharmacies)
- Pharmacies self-ordering Haleon products to distributors with personalized product suggestions, one-click re-ordering, favorites products and suggested basket features
- Earn extra loyalty points for online orders to accelerate digital ordering adoption
- Targeted promotions engine for basket-value and SKU-based offers
- POSM / PLV ordering structure to enable ordering physical marketing material placed at the pharmacies (in-store, near the checkout counter, or within aisles) to promote the product, brand, or offer.
- Earn extra loyalty points for online orders to accelerate digital ordering adoption.
3. Digital Ordering Layer (For Sales Team / Field Force)
- Sales reps can online order Haleon products on behalf of the pharmacies (with the same pharmacy view: personalized product suggestions, one-click re-ordering, favorites products and suggested basket features) and send the order to pharmacies for approval/editing before processing.
- Pharmacies approve or edit the sales rep orders and then orders are being sent to distributors for processing & delivery.
4. Educational & Enablement Layer
- PharmAcademy: A gamified learning module that is designed for pharmacists to help them grow their OTC business. Watch the videos to gain insights about shoppers and learn key strategies for effective merchandising. Accredited training courses and category development tips
- Product learning materials and promotional guidelines on demand
5. Operational Efficiency
- Salesforce-based solution/architecture for scalability and distributor/wholesaler integration
- Real-time retail execution tracking via AI-supported image recognition
- Cloud-based, multi-lingual platform serving multiple countries under one organization (instance)
Impact of the Saudi Arabia Pilot
This pilot phase is expected to:
- Improve operational efficiency
- Deliver an end-to-end ordering process for faster commercial transactions.
- Increase channel sales through measurable incentives
- Reduce dependency on field visits by digitizing engagement
- Strengthen brand visibility in competitive environments
Read the full program design & our work with Haleon.
Contact us for your Loyalty Program Health Check, and let’s design yours together.
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