The release date for an iPad app for The Australian has been announced – May 28. It will cost $4.99 monthly. I’ll be signing up as I embrace the iPad as an alternative channel to print. I’m keen to see how this compares other newspaper iPad apps, especially how they handle news as it evolves through the day.
Thanks to consistent external marketing, competitive pricing and tight range management, ink sales now account for mroe that 50% of stationery sales in two of my newsagencies. Plenty of other newsagents are telling me it is the same in their businesses.
Ink achieves this with only 15% of stationery floor space and around the same in overall stock investment. While the overall margin is slightly lower than stationery, stock turn is considerably higher as is average sale value – making the small margin sacrifice well worth it.
The new traffic being generated by ink is terrific since enough ink customers buy other items.
I expect ink sales as a percentage of stationery to continue to grow.
We are promoting some of the British titles we carry in a promotional display in the mall at the front of our newsagency. As the photo shows, I have gone for well known brands in the top two pockets – following the principles of beacon branding.
I like to take a break from billboard type displays promoting one title and to use the break to promote range. I am sure that people will walk past and notice a title they know and come in and browse as a result.
Shoppers make assumptions about the products they will find in a newsagency. We perpetuate this by promoting titles in our windows and toward the front of our shops which they see elsewhere. I have found value in changing this up every so often to show depth of range which may be unique in your area.
Within a couple of hours of putting the Woman’s Day Sweet Treats title at the counter yesterday we had our first sale. I knew would work well. The sponge looks delicious and the price point makes for an easy impulse purchase decision.
We treat our counter with respect when deciding what to display and for how long. We are completely selfish in our choices. Products which we think will sell easily get priority. While this infuriates some suppliers, it is the only way – we pay the rent after all.
We are brutal with our choices. If a product does not deliver results in a couple of days then it is gone from the counter. I suspect that Sweet Treats will stay for a week at least as I can see many of our customers buying the title. The last big success we had in this location was That’s Life Reader’s Recipes.
Margaret Simons writing at Crikey.com.au today provides an excellent perspective on the Bruce Guthrie case against News Limited in the Victorian Supreme Court which was decided last week in Guthrie’s favour. Andrew Crook writing last Friday at Crikey provided excellent coverage of the judgement.
Bruce Guthrie dared to take on News and pursue his rights. While he won, you wouldn’t know it if you read News Limited newspapers on the weekend. In the court of public opinion, publishers all too often act as prosecutor, judge and jury. A publisher concerned about publishing news would have played it straight down the line and reported the facts of the judgement.
Some of the behaviour attributed to senior News Limited personnel and presented as evidence in the case will be familiar to some newsagents. There are occasions when the newsagent publisher relationship is very one-sided. Newsagents don’t have the resources or balls to take on such a large company.
Hopefully one outcome of Bruce Guthrie’s court case is that more people will take on bigger opponents in all areas of business in pursuit of justice.
We are promoting the latest issue of Cleo to shoppers as they leave our busiest magazine aisle this week. This display will remain up for a week and then will move to an in-location display for the title. Our experience is that Cleo sells through the month and not so much in the first week so it makes sense to promote the title beyond the on-sale week.
Network Services sent us 20 copies of Cook Fast, a cookbook published under the Weight Watchers brand (not connected with the Australin Weight Watchers magazine). I questioned the supply at the time as we did not have any space for this unexpected arrival.
Last week, we took all 20 copies off the shelf having actively promoted the title at the counter and with newspapers as well as in with food titles. Not one copy sold.
In addition to having to pay to process the returns, we had to find the retail real estate, the labour creating displays and the cash given the model of paying for all stock supplied and then claiming a credit for returns.
We need a model which offers fair compensation for titles which do not achieve a minimum sell-through rate. I’d suggest a 50% sell-through is fair. Titles which achieve less than this should be paying their way. I would have some exceptions such as selected Australian small publisher titles we want to support for diversity of range.
Cook Fast looks like a cheap magazine, made up of material repurposed from elsewhere. While this may not be the case, it is what it looks like to me and I am a food magazine consumer. It does not have the quality of the AWW cookbooks which sell for $3.00 less.
If I had been given the courtesy of being asked whether I wanted the title I would have said yes to three or four copies, enough to fill a pocket. Since I was not given this courtesy and the title failed abysmally, someone needs to be financially accountable. Since my relationship is with network Services, I blame them.
To send twenty copies at a time when newsagents are being loaded with new and reissued food titles is poor behaviour by Network Services. While I am sure they will have an excuse, I won’t buy it. They have an obligation to treat newsagents fairly, with respect. The supply model for Cook Fast, based on my own experience, did not respect newsagents at all.
As I have written here many times previously, newsagents need a magazine czar, someone who controls what titles get access to our national retail network. Magazine distributors get it wrong too often and newsagents end up paying the price.
So I have written my piece and I feel a little better. Nothing will change. Newsagents will blame distributors. Distributors will blame newsagents and publishers. No one accepts responsibility for the failure of a title. Well, actually, that’s not true. Newsagents accept responsibility because they are contractually bound to do so. This is the unfairness of the current Australian magazine distribution model.
There, now I feel better.
The Australian is today reporting that News magazines will reprint around 15% of the initial print run of the launch issue of Master Chef magazine to meet demand. I have heard of strong sales over the weekend from several newsagents with whom I have had contact.
We had to change our Soccer International Magazine’s World Cup 2010 program counter display on Saturday due to its success. Sales from the counter and our sports magazine section have been excellent.
While we are chasing more stock, we added two more titles to fill the counter display.
World Cup titles have taken off in the last week. We will be chasing more stock to tide us through the next three weeks in the lead up to the competition.
The World Cup is an opportunity beyond magazine sales – smart newsagents are selling supporter collateral and branded merchandise.
Master Chef magazine has really taken off at our newsXpress Watergardens store. We were able to increase initial supply to 30 copies. We sold out in three days adn thankfully received 50 more on Friday. As of yesterday afternoon, we had 1 copy left. That is 49 copies sold in less than two days. key to the success is the high impact visual merchandising by our store manager Renee.
While it is early days for the title, it could be that Master Chef magazine is a good weekend title. I’d like that. We have built good business around Better Homes & Gardens as a weekend title. The mroe reasons we can pull people into newsagencies or build baskets on the weekend the better.
Last night’s $20 million lottery superdraw did very well for us, better than we had expected. Inidividual ticket and syndicate sales were strong. I think that the success had to do with the lack of other jackpots around the superdraw.
What I found most interesting is the success in over the counter up-sell. Mentioning the $20 million first division prize pool led to good impulse purchases.
Those who read the first quarter 2010 newsagency sales benchmark numbers I published here last month would not be surprised by the audit figures released for newspapers and magazines for the for the same period. The audit numbers confirm the accuracy of the benchmark data for magazines. The newspaper numbers in the audit are worse than I saw in the benchmark study. This could reflect greater volatility in channels outside newsagencies. It could also reflect the need for a bigger sample for newspaper sales analysis.
While the numbers are poor for magazines, declines in sales for most, the sales decline for Take 5 and That’s Life are particularly concerning since they underpin traffic on a Wednesday. I am pleased to see that Pacific Magazines is launching a revamped That’s Life next week. Both titles need innovation to drive sales. Given the sales of UK magazines in this space I see potential for new titles too.
The newspaper audit numbers are dreadful with only small upside for The Mercury, The Sunday Tasmanian and The Sunday Age. My personal view is that news is what sells newspapers. Too many newspapers have strayed from news.
Reasons for the decline aside, the newspaper numbers serve as an important reminder to newsagents that we need to evolve our model to rely less on newspaper traffic. It is vitally important that we build new traffic generators. It’s up to us, not suppliers, to build our relevance.
Newsagents have had to allocate considerably more space for Golf Digest this month thanks to the free magazine bagged with the current issue. Where we could usully display our supply in one pocket, this month we need two. That is double the retail real estate. Do magazine publishers think that this space is waiting to be allocated? Do they wonder how we can make the 100% increase in space requirements work? I doubt that it is given any thought at all. If they had to pay for the space allocation they would think twice.
What do I want here? Respect from a publisher when they double the space requirement. It probably comes down to money. If they double the thickness of a title they either pay to take extra space or increase the margin significantly. This is what other retailers would expect.
We are giving Gardening Australia a push with an in-location display in our gardening section. Even though this issue has been out a few days we decided to give it a push for the weekend as this is when we tend to sell more copies. Space permitting, we will maintain this promotion for a week. A benefit of these simple displays is that they are easy to setup and move – so we get more flexibility when we need it.
This is an idea we picked up from newsXpress Kin Kora for repurposing chocolate hearts left over from valentine’s day or Mother’s Day. Take two chocolate hearts stick them onto each other and place a stick in the middle. They look like a heart shaped flower and took little time to make. What a brilliant idea – customers love them! We have our new chocolate hearts on a stick at the counter for $1.50.
Converting two products into one is easy from a stock management perspective so we maintain data integrity.
Advertising Age in the US is reporting that magazine subscriptions will soon be sold using Facebook.
Synapse, a Time Inc. division that sells subscriptions for many publishers, is collaborating with Alvenda, a company that builds e-commerce applications, to introduce a system letting Facebook users buy print magazine subscriptions without leaving the site or even the Facebook news feed.
Facebook users who share a magazine article link in their news feeds find that friends can access the article and then subscribe from within Facebook.
The content Facebook users create on the website and the traffic we attract is becoming more powerful for advertising every day.
Rebates from greeting card companies are important to newsagents. They can range from a few percentage points to above 30%. They can significantly enhance the return from the card and wrap department.
Newsagents need to take care when negotiating greeting card rebate arrangements. they need to read the fine print and understand the full implications. here are some questions worth considering:
My point here to newsagents is to carefully consider all terms and conditions relating to a greeting card rebate agreement. Do your research. Ensure that the agreement suits your personal and business needs. Talk to other newsagents to ensure that what is on offer to you is fair for your business and the investment you will make with the card company.
The goal has to be a fair and equitable relationship between your newsagency and your greeting card supplier, a relationship where both businesses win.
We have a good range of overseas food magazines. All are selling well. Take easy cook magazine from the UK – we receive four copies and average sales of three each issue. This is a good result by any measure. I like the overseas food titles because their content offers a point of difference over Australian titles.
While in terms of overall sales volume the overseas titles account for less than 10% of total food magazine sales, carrying them makes us more of a specialist destination for food titles over other retailers selling magazines.
Okay, the iPad is ordered and the delivery day is set for June 7. The next step is to finalise the 3G plan (probably Telstra) and sort out a few content subscriptions. I’ll certainly sign up for a subscription to The Australian as that appears to be the most iPad ready newspaper in Australia.
I am looking forward to wholeheartedly embracing this new device – not for a day or two but for the long term. I want to see what difference it brings to my work day as well as to my consumption of news and information.
Heresy I head some say! Well, maybe. I expect this device to be a game-changer but that is only based on what I have read. I need to experience it myself before I understand the opportunities and the risks for Australian newsagents. So, I have taken the plunge and placed the order.
PC Magzine has just published an Australian iPad buying guide.
We were offered $50 to allow someone to weigh packs of AFL collector cards (not the newspaper cards) so they could find packets with premium cards and buy just these. Premium cards weigh slightly more than regular cards.
We said no thanks as we felt it would be unfair to our regular customers, the kids who will buy more than a thousand packs over the season. They save to build their collections and hope to get one of the premium cards.
While not one of life’s big ethical dilemmas, it is an interesting question – what price to veer off one’s moral compass.
There will be some who are happy to take the $50 and allow the boxes to be weighed and purchased. It’s a completely personal decision. That said, if we put our customers first then we have to say no to the $50.
