Representatives of News Limited have been visiting newsagents in NSW asking them to appoint the local Gloria Jeans coffee outlet a sub retailer for newspapers. From what I can tell there is no discretion about proximity of the Gloria Jeans to the newsagency or other retail outlets selling newspapers already services by the newsagency. It seems that a national deal has been struck by News Limited and Gloria jeans and newsagents have no opportunity to bring their local knowledge and business acumen to the situation.
It would be interesting to know whether usage clauses in Gloria Jeans’ leases allow the sale of newspapers.
Newsagents are the best outlets to sell more newspapers if that is what News Limited wants. Taking sales from newsagents by putting newspapers into more outlets like Gloria Jeans will not deliver the kind of growth newsagents can achieve. (Okay so News will say they are attracting incremental sales from this new outlet. I disagree.) Gloria jeans will not do special in store display or actively support newspaper promotions. Hell no other retailer supports the many special newspaper features and events like newsagents.
By getting their product into more and more outlets publishers are diluting attention of consumers and this can only hurt newsagents.
Newspaper sales in my newsagency were up by more than 10% 2005 compared to 2004 and that is in a mediocre centre with flat traffic. This is because we made decisions right for the business, decisions which were against publisher policy. In a dead shopping centre my results are proof that the right marketing can boost sales in a newsagency. This is where newspaper publishers ought to be focusing their attention – on the newsagency channel rather than outside it. Their attention should be on engaging with newsagents as business people and not as servants. They should reward success and they should fix their cover price problem.
In posting this I risk upsetting News and other newspaper publishers. They don’t like public negative comment about their tactics. I don’t like hearing about a poor decision which will hurt newsagents. Our small business channel has enough challenges. We don’t need a national publisher facilitating the loss of more traffic from our stores. This blog entry is a plea for active business engagement with News rather than competition.
See my earlier post about newspapers in Starbucks.