Month: December 2007

The photo shows our latest themed magazine promotion – located right next to our busiest register point.

Our New Year resolutions magazine offer focuses on health on the left and financial success on the right. Several of us participated in selecting the titles to ensure broad appeal from the promotion.

The display was put up Friday and already by late yesterday (Sunday) product had been purchased off the stand.

While we continue to create title based displays in high-traffic parts of the shop and feature top selling titles at the front of the shop, we see this space we have created as ours to play with. The success it generates is considerable. Most important to us is that we represent a range of publishers in our themed displays.

As I say here often, we obsess about magazines. As my post yesterday indicated, our growth in magazines is ahead of the national and state average. When publishers ask why, and they do, we say it’s because we are obsessive. You have to be when facing tough competition.

We have the process of creating these displays down pat – grabbing artwork from online resources (free) printing in-store and setting the display up in less than ten minutes.

We have had an excellent December in magazines at Forest Hill. Here are some of the increases (in unit sales): Crosswords 10%, Music 18%, Special Interest 23%, Food 6%, Adult 7% and Women’s Weeklies 3%.

What is interesting about this is that the overall number of sales including magazines did not grow as much. Most of the growth came through basket growth and this has been achieved through newsXpress strategies and our own obsession with magazines and driving every up-sell possibility.

Our focus is to have the store up-sell itself – based on layout, displays and obsessive moving of stock. I would pit our approach against the over the counter US style up-sell script pitch others tell newsagents they should use any day.

Some of us who love magazines have voted the cover of this issue of Delicious magazine as Magazine Cover of the Year for 2007.

Our criteria was simple: representation of and relevance to the content; pleasure to look at; and, likelihood, in our personal view, to drive sales – therefore driving a desire for newsagents to display the whole cover and not just the masthead as usually happens.

While the title of magazine Cover of the Year means nothing outside this blog, it represents our interest in magazines beyond being a stock item. This is a reflection of our obsession with magazines and a driver of our above average success in the category. If you don’t like a product how can you achieve maximum success from it?

Well done Delicious!

This Digital Photography Pocket Guide ought never have been distributed through newsagents. Besides being too expensive for the slim content, the six month on sale means we make a loss on the title.

This title is a good example of where newsagents paying on scanned sales would work – it would b at least better than us paying up front to fund the title and fund theft. It’s another example of why newsagents need to collude to stop titles like this getting through.

With no collateral from ACP Magazines’ Connections program this week, we have given our prime display spot to New Idea. The sales kick is a reminder of the value of balancing between publishers in this prime space.

I bet many newsagents are like me and give preference to the ACP displays because a full kit of display material arrives every Monday – making display decisions easy. The success of this New Idea display tells me we ought to program our use of this space to ensure balance across the magazine category and not just ACP titles.

I’d love more regular and appropriate display materials for other titles. Oh, and rewards based on year on year sales growth and not pretty displays. This week, while ACP snoozes, Pacific Magazines wins.

Magazine publishers and distributors pushed their product outside the newsagency channel and into other outlets (petrol and convenience, major retailers) in the name of giving consumers the choice. They said that times had changed. Well, it suited them today that. Times have changed. Boxing Day is a massive retail day in some states. yet we received no magazines to support the opportunity. I guess the times have changed pitch drives only some decisions. I wish we had magazine deliveries in Victoria as some customers in my newsagencies for the first time would have purchased a magazine from us.

There is an interesting discussion going on in the UK about the cover price of newspapers and magazines. Some newsagents want no cover price printed on publications so they can set the prices themselves. The National Federation of Newsagents in the UK, recently decided to investigate the feasibility of removing cover prices.

An issue driving the UK discussion – who carries the cost of the supply chain – is relevant in Australia. While magazine publishers and distributors have made great strides in cutting costs out of their supply models in recent years, the refusal of some to transact efficiently with newsagents has denied us the opportunity to cut costs out of our businesses.