Today’s newsagency business is more likely to be broad in its focus, serving a wide age group and carrying products that range from convenience through to destination gifts. Today’s newsagency is a mini department store.
When was the last time you looked at your business as a whole, the last time you marketed your business as a whole?
Often, our suppliers want us to work our business through their category. They want our time spent on their products and products from suppliers in their category. They want us to support promotions that drive interest in their category or their specific products. Some encourage and guide our focus and behaviour by giving us easy promotions to run, promotions that serve them and probably not the whole of our business.
Look in your average newsagency today and there are probably eight or ten supplier driven competitions. They all want attention, display space and over the counter promotion. Where is the voice of our newsagency in this? Our business gets lost, we cannot keep up with the marketing spend of our suppliers. In the end, their brands win while our brand fades.
I don’t blame suppliers who do this: who encourage, guide, pressure and bribe us to focus on their products more than the whole of our business. But I wish more would work with us on a whole of business marketing and management commitment. Some do but not enough.
I applaud those suppliers who do help us promote and manage the whole of our business – but not enough of them do this. The Pacific Magazines Nexus program is a good example of this – they have given us a professional email and txt marketing platform we can use for anything.
Newsagents need to do better at marketing the whole of our business. We need people shopping with us for us and not because a supplier promotes their products. We need to look at how we market the whole of our business and develop a plan to address this – for ourselves ahead of what some suppliers may want.
The newsagencies struggling today are more likely to be the ones leaving it up to their suppliers to attract shoppers through their doors. This is not a business plan, this is not good marketing for a newsagency business.