This photo shows how the bagged discount magazine pack of Woman’s Day, OK! and NW from Bauer is being treated at a Woolworths supermarket – away from weekly titles, display unit for AWW. And on that, note the header provided by Bauer for AWW for the display. I’d have said yes to a floor display unit to promote the Christmas issue of AWW if I was offered one. The difference in support for supermarkets which sell fewer magazines than the newsagency channel is disappointing.
Maybe because both WW and Coles have far fewer stores than Newsagents(a few hundred as opposed to thousands), they enjoy close to 50% of mag sales for the major aust publishers, so are a far more cost effective channel to promote through PLUS they have close to a 100% compliance level, whilst we as newsagents simply don’t have compliance, due to geographical spread are an expensive channel to service due to archaic thinking by newsagents which continues today- just look at the level of xchangeit compliance. Just food for thought-if you were a distributor where would you put your investment?
I disagree with you Cris. Coles and Woolies from my understanding get effective control of supply and what they receive (title and numbers), unlike newsagents. Compliance with Xchangeit is not hard to achieve.
Chris, 700+ Coles stores,900+ Woolies add a few hundred IGA’s carrying mags not to mention however many Colesworth owned fuel and conveinience stores carrying mags adds up to few thousand not a few hundred.
As for compliance I’m pretty sure unless Network and G&G are willing to pay for it the majors are not sending them sales data.
Steve the publisher get supermarket scanned sales data for a fee. Newsagents are the largest single channel. I guess my message with this and similar posts is careful what you wish for publishers because the supermarkets will eventually reduce your profit percentage.
Mark, your right about the majors eventually screwing down the publishers, they’ve done it in most other catagories so why not magazines? In fact their already on that path with their inhouse magazines (which put price pressure on the established branded mags the same way homebrands do in other segments) and the Coles always discounted deals on titles such as “Inside Out”, which if Coles is running to form will be an advertising bonus for them totally at the cost of the publisher.
Peter- Yes you are correct, compliance is easy, unfortunately less than 10% of newsagents are compliant, as a channel if we were compliant we would have so much more power over our business partners and might be taken a little more seriously. Scan data from the majors is collated and paid for by ac neilson(or whoever it is now) who then on sell it to the suppliers, pretty much the reverse of what we do in paying a company owned by the suppliers to harvest our data whilst billing us for the privilege, as for the argument that we benefit from edi files, really, all that does is enable us to not have to enter by title the masses of absolute crap they send us. Most supermarket don’t carry more than about 80 titles, quite easy to manage that number, especially when they only take titles that have strong sales and give them good stock turns enabling a high return for the space allocated. It concerns me that as a channel we can’t get compliance and as such the suppliers just stick to Ceasers theory of divide and conquer. They can just pick us off one by one and don’t have to worry about a large assault.
Cris I think you are mistaken. 30% of newsagents using XchangeIT are compliant. That’s a good base.
Interesting comment Mark, as I have been told from two separate sources that it is actually below 5%, even at 30% that is still pretty poor and does nothing to help us.
Cris some people in the magazine supply chain benefit from claiming less compliance than there is. My number is based on verifiable data. I’d say it could easily be 50% if suppliers were more vigilant.
Might be a dumb question but how can any agent using xchangeit not be compliant? Are they doing something wrong?
Cheers
Al