When a free gift hurts a magazine

I was in a Woolworths supermarket yesterday and a Coles this morning and could not see the Whitney Houston Woman’s Day tribute issue which came out Friday.  After some searching I found it (in each store), leaning forward in such a way as to completely obscure the cover.  This issue comes with a free gift of a make up stick of some sort.  The gift made the top of the magazine more than twice the thickness of the lower part. When the title has been placed in the pocket no one had thought to do it in such a way as to allow the cover to be seen.  While I will never know, I suspect that this will hurt sales – in this supermarket at least.

Supermarkets don’t like to have to manage magazines. They want to be able to put out all the stock they receive and leave it there for the on-sale.  In our newsagency if we received this stock we would put less in the pockets and ensure that the full cover could be seen. We would then top up the pocket as the week goes. I suspect that this is what m oct newsagents would do.

In the supermarket they see a magazine as a SKU. They expect the supplier to care about merchandising and replenishment of the shelves. This is where our channel is different. I wish that all of our suppliers would take more note of this. Newsagents would have derived more value from this gift than the supermarket I visited yesterday.

As for the gift itself, I don’t begrudge ACP placing it on supermarket product and not ours. Newsagents get gifts with Woman’s Day when supermarkets do not.