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BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Walmart wants to be the one-stop shop of choice for customers’ health and wellness needs, says Ralph Clare, the company’s senior vice president of merchandising for health and wellness and consumables.
“It’s incredibly important for us to be able to provide the full assortment of goods for any need state in our customers’ health journey,” he says.
Whether someone has an acute or chronic issue, Walmart, with its more than 4,500 stores, intends to be a convenient destination for products and services to address the concern, he comments. “When you think about convenience, it’s incredibly clear that with our pickup and delivery options, this is a place where our customers can get everything they need — essentials, O-T-Cs, medicines and supplements. And as of recently, we’re delivering prescriptions. So we’ve got our customer covered holistically with convenience and ease. That’s incredibly important for us. And clearly affordability is key as we think through all of that.”
For being key to Walmart’s success at being a convenient, affordable health and wellness destination, Clare has been named Chain Drug Review’s Merchant of the Year.
A native of the Bahamas, Clare says when he left the islands he wanted to go someplace where he could have an impact, “where it doesn’t feel like you have left or sacrificed anything, because you’re doing good for people. There’s no other place I’d rather be than Walmart, because it fulfills that goal. It provides that ability to have a significant impact on people’s lives.”
Having been in the baby business before this, and now in health and wellness, “it feels good,” he adds. “That’s why I love this job. When we create solutions for customers, it feels good. We are helping people. We are truly enabling that mom to take care of that parent who now lives with her, or that dad to take care of the 2-year-old who has a fever, when neither knows exactly what to get them.”
Moreover, Walmart can help make those experiences frictionless now, and less complicated. “In my role, I have the opportunity to help create solutions for the customers at scale in a way that only Walmart can, and that is the exciting and fun part of this job. It is a pleasure to be able to do this. I have a great time. These are hard jobs but, man, it feels good when you get things right. And so we are really focused on just taking care of the customer and having an impact in their lives, and that’s incredibly rewarding.”
Besides responsibility for in-store health care product merchandising, Clare helps oversee Walmart’s digital presentation of the category as part of its omnichannel approach. The company tries to view its e-commerce offerings through the lens of the customer, he says. “They don’t see the different kind of channels — they see Walmart. So the goal is to ensure that we have a seamless shopping experience regardless of how they decide to make their purchase, whether it’s digital or in-store.”
And integral to seamlessness is the ease with which customers can quickly get what they need. “That’s the most important element. The overarching idea is optimizing the interface with the customer wherever they connect with Walmart, and making that connectivity as frictionless as possible.”
Asked about how to balance the need to cater to digital shoppers with the desire to keep people coming to stores, he says there can be a synergy there, with customers initially going online but ultimately making a brick-and-mortar purchase, possibly at curbside, of an order placed digitally. Further blurring the distinction between digital and in-store shopping is the chance to have an online order rapidly delivered from a store.
“It’s a differentiated kind of omnichannel model where we not only have fulfillment centers to get people products, but we also have delivery from stores, which in some cases gets customers their order to their doorstep in less than two hours,” he says. “That is a game changer, especially when you layer in prescriptions.”
Closely tied to the appeal of fast delivery is maintaining Walmart’s legacy as place for customers to save money, Clare adds. “We really need to be in a spot where regardless of their need state or economics, we have people covered. And we feel pretty good about our ability to do that. Customers keep choosing us because we are easy, because we are affordable, because we have quality brands, because we have whatever they need for their families. That’s what we’re excited about.”
Of course staying affordable has hardly hindered the company’s investments in technological advances, most recently in adaptive retail. “The first thing that comes to mind is search,” Clare says of the latest initiatives. “We’ve enhanced our search capabilities on walmart.com, leveraging AI, to ensure that customers can find what they need a little bit faster and more intuitively. The second thing is we’re using technology to help our associates serve customers better in-store. The ability to help people find the location of items, and to describe them, is incredibly important. Our store associates are now empowered with technology to help them to take care of the customers a little bit better.”
Digital capabilities are focused on quickly and conveniently helping customers live and feel better, further attracting them to Walmart, he notes. “We’ve thought through how to leverage that to the highest level to make sure it’s easy for our customers to find what they need very quickly.”
The company is well aware that customers are tending to be more proactive when it comes to their health, turning to self-care when possible. That trend has driven sales of vitamins and supplements, Clare points out. “We’ve continued to expand our mix to ensure that we have what customers need. So if you really don’t want to get sick and you’re taking a proactive approach to do your best to stay well, we have a full assortment of trusted brands as well as a robust private brand offering.”
On the other hand, concern with incipient symptoms has lifted the home diagnostics category. People are quite comfortable testing themselves at home, especially for acute conditions, says Clare. “If they just want to check if a scratchy throat is something more than maybe a cold, they can come to us for a product to see what else could be there and how they can take care of it.”
Anyone needing help with product selection can turn to Walmart pharmacists, who, Clare notes, are “incredibly trusted and part of a team that serves our customers on a daily basis.” Consumers regularly approach pharmacists for advice ranging from recommendations for treating acute conditions to components of a vitamin regimen. “Our expert pharmacists are there to help them.”
“We work very closely with our pharmacy team to ensure that customers can find everything they need for holistic care,” he says. Whether a patient needs information on a prescription or O-T-C, “you’ve got an expert that’s there who can tell you about what’s in our assortment. And we communicate to pharmacy teams regularly to apprise them of upcoming launches and the products’ benefits. There’s a lot of engagement with the pharmacists. We know that they’re critical to our ability to service the customer, so we maintain a really strong connection with them to ensure that they are able, in a very informed way, to communicate solutions.”
The ease of search at Walmart comes into play by making it “incredibly easy” for customers to find relevant items for their ailments, as well as complementary products, he notes. “We’re able to very quickly get the customer a good size basket of useful items based on the search for one product and the discovery of more that are directly connected to it. Our ability to quickly do that, to create relevant solutions for them, is what drives ease of shopping for our customers, so we’re very much focused on that.”
Beyond that, walmart.com has landing pages for different categories to help educate and inform people on varied subjects, he adds. “We try to have customers’ needs completely covered. So if they’re trying to figure out how to address a particular problem, our goal is to remove the cognitive load and make it super quick for them to find what they need, and at the same time provide the full basket of what they need to take care of their family.”
To that end, both national brands and private brand products play “a critical role,” with the company’s Equate over-the-counter remedies and Spring Valley vitamins and herbal supplements providing “quality care at an incredibly affordable price.” At the same time, national brands bring innovation and quickly bring new types of products to market. So you’ve got to have a mixture of both to have a successful assortment,” says Clare.
Asked what advice he has for suppliers, he says to concentrate on the customer. “Any successful relationship with Walmart is built on a relentless focus on serving the customer. As long as that’s the first thing that you’re doing, we can have a really good relationship and we can do a lot together. Second is, based on that focus, bring us innovation that’s impactful. We need innovation that will meaningfully help customers on their journey in a way that shows a high level of commitment, as well as a high level of empathy. We’re in health and wellness, right? People are here because they want to feel better.
“They want their kids to feel better. They want their grandparents and parents to feel better. You have to meet them where they are and really understand what they’re dealing with, and bring innovation based on that. Understand each phase of our customer’s journey, look at them and say, ‘Where are the gaps?’ And if you solve for those gaps, it will be incredibly beneficial for each of our organizations, because it shows that you’ve spent the time to empathetically connect with the customer to create innovative solutions. That’s incredibly important for us.”
Collaboration is another priority, he adds. “How do we bring something to the table that works for you, and works for me, and is exactly what the customer needs?”
