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Strategies 261

• Quality customer service (QCS).
• Inventory management and management information systems (MIS).
• Pharmacy management.
• Developing, with USAID privatization contractor Abt Associates, a
franchising model (including funding to design and construct a model
pharmacy) to assist in replicating successful businesses and leveraging
business development investments.
• Designing, developing, and deploying a geographic information
system (GIS) to provide near-real-time information about inventory
levels of Red Apple products at individual pharmacies throughout the
country.

Consumer
While most of SOMARC’s place strategy was focused on suppliers, consumer
place efforts were concentrated on building the pharmacy into an easily accessi-
ble, central repository of both accurate information about, and consistently
available stocks of, Red Apple contraceptives. These strategy tactics included:

• Designing, developing, and producing a broad array of point-of-
purchase materials to support Red Apple sales and counseling efforts in
the pharmacies. Materials ranged from product displays to brochures
with in-depth information about Red Apple products and their correct,
appropriate use.
• Providing training/technical assistance to Red Apple pharmacies/
pharmacists in modern contraceptive technology and customer counseling.

Promotion

When SOMARC began the project, there were no established marketing re-
search, public relations, or advertising agencies. Prior to independence, the press
was not open in Central Asia or anywhere else in the Soviet Union. Newspapers
and reporters wrote about topics dictated by their employer, the state govern-
ment. The concept of consumer marketing was not in the Soviet lexicon, be-
cause for decades the government had dictated the wants and needs of the
country’s consumers, based on multiyear “Central Plans” that forecast the neces-
sary supplies of virtually every item produced or imported by the Soviet Union,
thereby rendering Western-style professional marketing skills superfluous.
Consequently, before beginning to develop a campaign, SOMARC first
identified resources in the region with some rough equivalent of expertise in