Month: February 2008

At the risk of upsetting publishers we have taken the two two pockets of waterfalls from three busy magazine titles permanently to display six other titles.  We place the six titles based on colour and appropriateness for the women who mainly shop in this part of our newsagency.

Sales of Australian Women’s Weekly, New Idea and Women’s Day have not been affected.  Sales of Money, Your Mortgage, Better Homes, Women’s Health, Burkes Backyard and Good Health are up thanks to more eyeballs seeing them.   We refresh the mix of titles weekly and often make decisions based on title covers – we want covers which draw attention of those looking at the main display.

For years newsagents have been told to full waterfall high volume weekly and monthly titles.  By taking back the two two pockets we can lift other titles while not hurting the feature title.  This is a win win isn’t it?  certainly the basket data we’re looking at suggests our efforts are rewarded.

Newsagents are too regulated by some publishers and distributors and this stifles those of us who want to be entrepreneurial in chasing magazine sales.  I appreciate it’s easy to call for freedom and harder to implement.  I wish publishers would be more encouraging rather than chasing a common, lower, goal.

Further to my earlier post today about Good Health magazine, here is evidence of the value of promoting early in the sales cycle.

The new issue of Women’s Health came out yesterday, with posters and other material from the publisher. We created an aisle end display and sales kicked as a result.

I want my business to be known for promoting fresh product. The display for Women’s Health does that. People who see the new issue of a magazine first in my newsagency will be more likely to respect my store as the go to place for magazines.

Publishers need to understand the need for newsagency relevance and support us with in-store marketing material accordingly.

The early bird gets the worm, or so the saying goes. Good Health magazine came in a week ago and we duly displayed it in several locations and sold 60% of our allocation in the first five days.

Yesterday, we discovered that Good Health is the feature magazine for the ACP Connections marketing promotion this week. Too late I say. We’re now low on stock and while we could order more, they won’t come until Friday at the earliest by which time the promotion opportunity is lost since we would be a few days away from our next promotion.

Marketing promotions for specific titles need to be scheduled for the on sale day and not a week later. While the publisher will see this as me complaining, the alternative, and more appropriate, view would be that I want to maximise sales and that for most magazines this is early in the sales cycle.

Folio Magazine has published an update on US magazines which are testing the use of mobile phone readable barcodes on advertisements.  While the is more about advertiser connection with consumers, it will also provide publishers with interesting data on use of technology.

I was surprised to see this new magazine in one of our newsagencies. Let’s Get Engaged! looks good – right on target for the demographic.

What is odd to me is that we received it at Frankston but not at Forest Hill where wedding magazine sales are stronger. Some days the magazine supply model makes no sense at all.

We have the title next to the wedding secti0n but are wondering if we should have some fun and put it with the sports or car magazines.