Month: February 2007

I’m in Adelaide and every newsagent I visit here tells me that SA Life is the best magazine they have. Since it’s launch, sales have been strong, especially in more affluent demographics. Here’s a locally published magazine aimed only at the local market and it’s outselling all other monthlies. Mention SA Life and newsagents here smile: great sales, good cover price and, most important, local. Parochial sells.

SA Life (distributed by NDD) is a great story beyond its own success in some newsagencies where they use the title as a ‘magnet’ to draw attention to other titles and try and grow the category.

Even though it’s not national, its stellar success demands SA Life is considered for the newsagent voted magazine of the year awards.

UPDATE 17/2: SA Life has two sister publications: Highlife Magazine in Bowral, NSW, and, Tasmanian Life.

I’m surprised that jmag is going monthly. The music category is as challenged in the magazine space as it is for over the counter CDs. Music retailers are scrambling to find products to cover the collapse of CDs. In the magazine space, general titles (Rolling Stone, Q, MoJo and Uncut) sales are down while some specialist titles are holding stead. The challenge of the re-launch for newsagents is making a noise in a stale category for such a launch – we’ll have to reconfigure to re-attract people to that space. Of course, the re-launch may product a title with a broader base than at present and that would be welcome.

Blokes will be happy to see the cover of Alpha is back to its very successful roots with the latest issue. Even though last month’s curvey issue sold well, there were enough comments to suggest guys prefer a sports magazine which looks like a sports magazine.

Gardening Australia has a great and practical feature in its latest issue (out yesterday) on water saving tips so we’ve done this display next to our busiest register. It more titles arrive with water saving tips we’ll add them to the display.

We are thinking of finding space in-store for people to add water saving tips of their own – to make for a more interactive experience with the title and our shop. That’s a project for another day.

I went to the Gardening Australia website expecting to find this opportunity but instead it’s a pretty static ad with no reader interaction. Disappointing, but the magazine rocks!

NW and Famous have Anna Nicole Smith cover stories this week and sales are average. Given the TV and newspaper coverage I expected to see spikes for both titles but it’s not happening. It could have something to do with the nature of the story – it is changing so fast that consumers know that the magazine stories will be out of date already. I am surprised that neither title has updated the story on their website since Feb. 9.

Sales of this month’s issue of The Monthly are double recent months at my shop. I wonder if it is a reflection of the polling results today showing Kevin Rudd as the preferred Prime Minister over John Howard.

The Monthly’s sales, being a relatively new title, are cover driven. This is why we try and place it where the whole cover can be seen as opposed to the usual magazine fixturing. For the first week of on sale the best location seems to be above The Age in our newspaper stand. We’ve tried placing The Monthly with our weekly newsmagazines without much success.

What prompted me to look at sales data is today’s cover story in The Age – when I saw it and The Monthly together.

Better store design can fix cash flow problems for newsagents.

I am currently working with eight newsagents on cash-flow challenges which mainly stem from magazines. In some cases the cash-flow problems have come about by poor management by the newsagent and in other cases magazine distributors are to blame. I’m not an expert, but I do have access to significant industry wide data through my software company and can apply that to gain an understanding of the problems.

In one newsagency, the overall sell through rate of all titles from each of two magazine distributors is 45%. That is, 55% of all magazine stock sent over the course of a year did not sell. The combined cash-flow position for the two distributors in the newsagency in question is in excess of $25,000. So, taking into account retail real-estate, labour to manage the titles and invoices and credits and the newsagent is $25,000 worse off for having this stock.

There is no excuse for this behaviour given that both companies have sales data which would tell them the negative financial impact they are having on the newsagent. They are ignoring their own data. Some reading this will say the newsagent can cut the title from what they receive. This is not how magazine distributors operate. Every newsagent has evidence of distributors agreeing to cut a title only to find it or a similar title added to supply in a few months.

This photo from my shop illustrates part of the problem newsagents face.

We have two big aisles of magazines. It takes up 40% of our shopping centre based floor space. This is how newsagencies have been laid out for years. Chunky magazine display space. We’re the magazine specialists, of course we will give plenty of real-estate to the department. Distributors know that and they scale out accordingly.

Our shops are designed to take a huge range without displaying it in the best possible light.

Newsagents need to reduce magazine shelf space by as much as 33%. Until this is done and suppliers formally notified in writing, the supply model will not alter. Magazine distributors have shown collectively that they are not capable of managing our real-estate so we must. Of course, we should have been doing this years ago. But we trusted our partners and we trusted our shop designers – these designers have a lot to answer for.

Most newsagents won’t reduce magazine space because they think they have nothing to replace the stock with and because, despite the issues, magazines are easy – no stocking, pricing or ranging decisions. So, laziness and lack of entrepreneurial spirit stops the problem most complained about being addressed across the channel.

The entrepreneurial newsagents will win. Some are active today and history will recognise them as visionary.

Too often we’re our own worst enemy.