Month: May 2009

The team at our Frankston store are promoting men’s lifestyle titles using aisle end display space.  We do not have the space here to create a separate more permanent area for multiple titles as I discussed yesterday.   The latest issue of Men’s Health is benefiting from this display focus as the photo shows.

I am often asked why we give over premium space for display like this when supermarkets charge.  My view is that the time to fight that fight was many years ago.  Today, magazine range is one of the few points of difference newsagents have.  Displays like this make us valuable to publishers.  I am happy to invest the space and time with a view to this facilitating publisher interest in other projects.

I also like great in-store displays because they can bring a fresh feel to the business without spending any money.

The key is to drive sales.  This is why every display has a shelf or stand off of which the product being promoted can be purchased.  Otherwise, they are merely a billboard.

We are promoting Delicious at the counter for the weekend at Forest Hill.  While our display of Harpers Bazaar did okay, it was not enough to justify the space allocation for the weekend.  I suspect we will do much better out of Delicious as the title is a strong performer for us and the free block of Lindt chocolate makes it even more appealing.

Our experience with Delicious is that it responds well in an impulse situation- such as at the counter or placed with weekly magazines outside its usual category. Our focus on promoting it in several places in the on-sale week works for us and achieves an excellent sell-through for this title.

As a follow-up to a previous post, I note that the chocolate itself has come through the distribution system in surprisingly good shape.

Newsagencies across the country improvise every day when things don’t go as planned.  Such improvisations range from the major to right down to the small – like this morning when The Age arrived in one of our stores without posters again.  We used this as an opportunity to pitch Who magazine with a poster in The Age poster slot and copies of Who above The Age and the Herald Sun.  While these seem like small moves, they illustrate the flexibility many of us demonstrate every day.  A challenge here becomes an opportunity elsewhere.

We currently have Top Gear in print position in the cars segment of our magazine department.  Top Gear is pitched to advertisers more as a men’s lifestyle magazine from what I read than a car lovers magazine.

This is why we will experiment with a new Men’s Lifestyle area where we bring together a collection of titles which speak to the same target consumer – Top Gear, Popular Science, Ralph, FHM, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, GQ, Esquire, Inside Sport and a few others.

I’d try and leave them where they currently are and co-locating to a new feature area clearly branded as the Men’s Lifestyle area.  The goal of the change would be to get more than one of the titles purchased in each sale. leaving Top gear displayed only with car magazines hinders its sales as well as its ability to drive sales of other titles to many who purchase it.

There are bound to be some mistakes in creating this new area – we will learn from them.

There was a time when the Magazine Publishers of Australia organisation was involved in these layout discussions.  Unfortunately, we are more on our own today.  I’d be interested in how others group these cross traditional category men’s lifestyle titles.

Delicious magazine sells well for us.  The block of chocolate should help sales of the issue out today.  Given display space pressures elsewhere, we have placed some of our Delicious stock in among our weekly magazines.  We have been experimenting with one or two pockets with our weeklies this year and sales from this location are good.  This is why we expect the flat stack and three pocket display to work well for us.

For the benefit of NDD and their lawyers I’d note that our supplies of Delicious are good – certainly not oversupplied.

We are promoting a range of crossword titles next to our main lottery counter this week.  We are featuring top selling crossword titles from Lovatts, Puzzler, Woman’s Day, That’s Life and Mr Wisdom.

As the photo shows, we have been careful to display most of the cover – this is important since we are chasing sales to people who may not be regular crossword purchasers and the covers are more appealing than mastheads.

We track quantities in each pocket so as to determine sales from this location compared to others.  We also use our software to track sales with lottery products this week compared to past weeks.

Like all good promotions, if it works it is repeated and if it does not work we focus on other opportunities.  Past experience shows that crosswords should see a lift as result of this promotion.