More than half of 400 pharmacy owners in England polled by healthcare marketing agency Brand Champions named not knowing where to start as their biggest obstacle to local marketing, according to research the company published today - a larger share than cited time, budget and doubts about effectiveness combined.

In Short

A marketing agency asked 400 pharmacy owners in England what stops them promoting their pharmacy locally, and 52% said they simply do not know where to begin, while only 20% blamed money. It matters because most of those owners also think the majority of their patients do not know about the services they offer beyond handing out prescriptions, just as the NHS prepares to let more pharmacists prescribe medicines directly. What changes is mainly the conversation: the poll describes a knowledge gap rather than a budget gap, although it comes from a company that sells marketing help to pharmacies and leaves out key details of how it was run.

What the poll found

Four answers were on offer, and one dominated. According to Brand Champions, 52% of respondents said a lack of marketing direction was the biggest obstacle to local promotion. Time constraints came second at 23%, budget limits third at 20%, and doubts about whether marketing works at all trailed at 5%.

Those four figures add up to exactly 100%. That indicates respondents picked a single answer rather than ticking every barrier that applied - a detail that changes how the headline number should be read. The 52% is the share of owners for whom not knowing where to start outranked the other three options, not the total share who lack direction. An owner who chose time as the main barrier could also be unsure where to begin, and the format would not capture it.

On a base of 400, the shares translate into roughly 208 owners naming lack of direction, 92 naming time, 80 naming budget and 20 doubting effectiveness, according to PPC Land's own calculation, which assumes every respondent answered the question.

Patients and the services they miss

The second set of findings concerns what owners believe their patients know. According to Brand Champions, 87% of community pharmacies believe fewer than half of their patients are aware of the full range of healthcare services they offer. A narrower group, 44% of respondents, said very few patients knew about any services beyond prescription dispensing.

These are owners' perceptions, not measurements of patient awareness. The poll did not survey patients, and the announcement does not describe any check against booking data, service volumes or footfall. What it does capture is how pharmacy owners themselves see the gap between what their premises can do and what the people walking past them assume.

Why owners think patients don't know

Asked why awareness is low, pharmacy professionals split almost evenly across three explanations. According to Brand Champions, 35% said patients turn to GPs or online searches first, 33% said their own communications had not been clear enough, and 32% pointed to entrenched public habits that treat pharmacies solely as places to collect prescriptions.

Again, the three figures total 100%, which points to a single-choice question. The near-even split is itself informative. One in three respondents attributed the problem to their own messaging rather than to patient behaviour or competition from GPs and search engines - a degree of self-criticism that sits alongside the headline finding that most owners do not know how to begin fixing it.

How the research was conducted

Brand Champions describes the work as "a Brand Champions poll of 400 pharmacy owners in England." Beyond that line, the methodology is thin.

The announcement does not state when the fieldwork took place, how respondents were recruited, whether an independent research firm ran the poll, or the wording of any question. It does not say whether results were weighted, whether owners of several branches answered once or once per pharmacy, or how independent pharmacies compare with small chains. No margin of error is given.

The respondent group is also described in three different ways across the material. The poll is introduced as covering "pharmacy owners," the 52% finding is expressed as a share of "community pharmacies," and the reasons for low awareness are attributed to "pharmacy professionals." Owners, pharmacies and professionals are not the same population: a single owner can run several pharmacies, and pharmacy professionals include employed pharmacists and technicians who do not own the business.

For scale, Community Pharmacy England counted approximately 10,400 community pharmacies in England in its 2026 briefing for MPs, a figure it noted was 800 lower than in 2021. A sample of 400 owners would correspond to just under 4% of that total, according to PPC Land's own calculation, if each owner represented a single pharmacy.

There is also the question of who commissioned the work. Brand Champions sells marketing services to pharmacies, and the central finding - that pharmacies need direction more than money - fits the service the agency launched three weeks earlier. That does not make the figures wrong, but the announcement offers no independent check on them.

Independent prescribing raises the stakes

Brand Champions ties the findings to a change in what community pharmacies are allowed to do. According to the company, the gap between pharmacies' clinical role and public perception is "made urgent by the Autumn 2026 rollout of NHS-funded independent prescribing, which enables qualified pharmacists to assess patients and prescribe medicines directly."

The NHS timetable supports the broad outline. NHS England has told integrated care boards that independent prescribing will be introduced into NHS community pharmacy services from autumn 2026, covering prescriber-led consultations within Pharmacy First and the pharmacy contraception service, with prescribing also enabled and monitored in a prescription management service. According to NHS England, boards had to have a process in place by August 2026 to identify, approve and onboard pharmacies, and at least 95% of onboarded pharmacies are expected to be delivering prescriber-led consultations by March 31, 2027. Legal directions are due to be published in autumn 2026. The specific conditions and medicines are still being developed through clinical reference groups.

The change forms part of the 2026/27 community pharmacy contract. According to The Pharmaceutical Journal, which reported the deal on May 29, 2026, the government and Community Pharmacy England agreed a funding package of £3.636bn, a 10.3% increase worth £340m on the previous year, and up to five new prescribing-only pathways are to be added to Pharmacy First. Community Pharmacy England said at the time that it doubted the investment was sufficient to introduce independent prescribing in full, according to the same report.

Brand Champions points to Pharmacy First as an example of a service whose public profile has not kept pace. The service launched in England on January 31, 2024, allowing participating pharmacies to assess and treat seven common conditions - sinusitis, sore throat, earache, infected insect bites, impetigo, shingles and uncomplicated urinary tract infections in women - including supplying prescription-only medicines where appropriate, without a GP appointment.

Brand Champions cites outside evidence that public knowledge has lagged. Healthwatch England, the statutory patient watchdog, published a report on June 30, 2025 based on a representative poll of 7,029 adults in England. According to Healthwatch, among respondents who said they were unlikely to use a pharmacy for the seven conditions, 29% were unaware that pharmacies could provide advice and treatment for them. That figure applies only to that subgroup rather than to all adults, and Healthwatch does not state the subgroup's size.

What Brand Champions' founder said

Fiona Wylie, founder and chief executive of Brand Champions, opened with the sector's strengths. "Pharmacies are some of the most trusted organisations on the high street. They have deep relationships with their communities, clinical expertise and an expanding range of services that can make a real difference to people's health. But trust isn't the same as being top of mind," she said.

The distinction she draws - between being trusted and being recalled at the moment someone needs help - is what brand researchers call salience. A pharmacy can be well regarded by everyone who uses it and still be absent from a patient's thinking when a sore throat starts.

Wylie then turned to the headline finding. "What's particularly interesting about our polling is that the biggest barrier to promoting pharmacies wasn't necessarily money or time - it was not knowing where to start. That's a real opportunity for the sector," she said. "Pharmacies don't need enormous marketing budgets or complicated campaigns to make themselves more visible. They need to understand their local communities, identify what matters to the people around them and communicate clearly about how they can help."

Where patients look first

More than a third of respondents blamed low awareness on patients going to GPs or online searches first. That second route has been changing quickly, and in ways that matter for a small health business.

Google said in March that it receives one billion health questions every day, with health searches running about three times longer than average. At the time, Google blocked ads inside AI summaries for health-related queries. In May, Google confirmed it was testing healthcare ads in AI Mode for English-language queries in the United States only, with creatives that use pinning or text disclaimers excluded. OpenAI, for its part, said when it set out its first advertising plans in January that ads would stay away from sensitive and regulated subjects including health, mental health and politics, as PPC Land reported in its coverage of ChatGPT opening ads to 700 million users. For a UK pharmacy, paid placement inside the main AI answer surfaces is largely unavailable for health topics.

The organic route is under pressure too. In August, Blood Cancer UK reported a 53% fall in page views to its leukaemia information page as Google's AI Overviews answered questions directly on the results page. Before that, Google's December 2025 core update left several large health publishers with sharply lower visibility, WebMD among them.

For a business with a shop front, discovery increasingly runs through local listings and maps. A pharmacy's Google Business Profile controls the name, hours, photos and reviews shown in Search and Maps, and Google has turned those listings into a data layer that feeds AI, Maps and Search, including the Gemini-powered Ask Maps, which Google says draws on data from 300 million places. Paid listings are claiming more of that space: Places Scout data showed ads in the local pack appearing on about 22% of tracked mobile keywords by January 2026, up from under 3% in early November 2025.

AI assistants add a further filter. A study by 8ight.AI, published this month, found that ChatGPT named only 3.4% of tested local businesses with fewer than 25 Google reviews, compared with 22.2% of those with 1,000 or more. That research covered trades and fitness studios in North America rather than pharmacies, and 8ight.AI sells services in the field. Still, it describes the kind of visibility test a pharmacy faces when a patient asks a chatbot where to get help nearby.

None of this context appears in the Brand Champions material, which does not break down which channels respondents currently use, or whether any of them advertise online.

The same agency, three weeks apart

The poll is the second pharmacy announcement from Brand Champions this month. On October 8, the agency opened a postcode-based service that promises UK pharmacies a snapshot of local demographics, health needs, search demand and their own visibility within a fortnight - a launch PPC Land covered when Brand Champions offered UK pharmacies a postcode marketing check in 14 days. That service, as described then, was built on public local authority, Census and NHS data, with no published price, sample report or named pharmacy client.

The two announcements fit together. The postcode check is pitched as a starting point for pharmacies, and today's poll argues that a starting point is what most of them lack. Wylie's prescription - understand local communities, identify what matters to them, communicate clearly - closely matches what the postcode check says it delivers. The poll announcement itself does not mention the service.

Brand Champions describes itself as "an independent, award-winning, female-led marketing agency providing on-demand and embedded expertise to leading consumer and healthcare brands." Its main offer is SOS, short for Service on Stand-by, which places experienced marketers inside client teams for campaign and launch support, interim cover and longer assignments. According to The Pharmacy Show's speaker profile, Wylie founded the agency in 2017 after more than 20 years in marketing with brands including Pfizer, British Airways and Nestlé, and was listed among speakers at the show at the NEC in Birmingham on October 11 and 12, 2026.

Why this matters for marketers

Surveys of small businesses usually put money near the top of the list of constraints. A LocaliQ report covered by PPC Land in November 2025 found that 52% of small businesses operate on monthly marketing budgets below $1,000, and half had no staff dedicated solely to marketing. That research drew on just over 300 owners, mostly in North America, and asked different questions, so the figures cannot be compared directly. But the Brand Champions poll stands out for placing budget third, behind both expertise and time.

If the finding holds, it has practical implications for the companies that sell to pharmacies, from agencies and local listing platforms to healthcare media owners. A sector that says it does not know where to start is a sector where packaged, low-cost diagnostics and templates compete on clarity rather than on reach. It is also a sector with tight rules on what can be said about medicines in advertising, which narrows the options available to an owner who decides to begin.

The policy timing sharpens the issue. NHS England expects nearly all onboarded pharmacies to be offering prescriber-led consultations by the end of March 2027. If 87% of owners are right that most of their patients do not know the full range of what is on offer today, new prescribing services will arrive into the same awareness gap. Whether pharmacies, the NHS or commercial partners close that gap - and who pays to do it - is a question the poll raises but does not answer.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Brand Champions, a UK healthcare and consumer marketing agency founded and led by Fiona Wylie, and the 400 pharmacy owners in England it polled. The findings concern community pharmacies and the patients they serve.

What: A poll in which 52% of respondents named not knowing where to start as their biggest barrier to local marketing, ahead of time (23%), budget (20%) and doubts about effectiveness (5%). 87% believe fewer than half of their patients know the full range of services they offer, and 44% said very few patients know about anything beyond dispensing. Fieldwork dates, recruitment and question wording were not disclosed.

When: The findings were published today, October 28, 2026, as NHS-funded independent prescribing is due to begin in community pharmacies in England from autumn 2026, three weeks after the agency launched a postcode marketing check for pharmacies.

Where: England, where Pharmacy First has operated since January 31, 2024, and where around 10,400 community pharmacies operate, according to Community Pharmacy England.

Why: According to Brand Champions, the expanding clinical role of community pharmacies has outpaced public awareness of their services, and the main obstacle owners report is a lack of marketing direction rather than money. For marketers and platforms selling to the sector, the poll describes a knowledge gap arriving at the same moment as new NHS prescribing services, though it comes from an agency with a commercial interest in that conclusion.