Our tactical placement of Philosophy Now with newspapers on Monday is working well. In five days we have matched our usual sales for the total on-sale. I’d expect us to sell out before the next issue comes out. The Is God Really Dead? cover is the reason – you can see people notice it when they go to pick up a newspaper.
We are taking the opportunity to promote the latest issue of The Week magazine with Julia Gillard on the cover on our main newspaper stand for the next few days. The cover is excellent and with the new PM in a honeymoon period it should achieve some extra business for us. We have two perspex pockets on our newspaper stand, one above The Age and one above the Herald Sun, for tactical title placement. Our goal is to turn newspaper sales into newspaper + magazine sales. With the right title they work very well for us.
Sam Zell, Chairman of newspaper publisher Tribune was on CNBC yesterday talking about their bankruptcy proceedings. In the same interview he commented about the future of newspaper home delivery. and “how the media and particularly the newspaper side of the business are going to change in the future.”
Zell said: “going forward, it’s going to require all kinds of different approaches, including probably most significant, the elimination of home delivery and the replacement of it by PDFs.”
Checkout the report at PaidContent. Then watch the video.
Given the conisderable economic losses many newsagents incurred as a result of the Telstra network outage earlier this week, it will be interesting to see if Tattersalls lodged a claim for compensation with the telco.
The Herald Sun quoted Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton on the issue of compensation resulting from the outage, noting that it was for:
For corporate customers that depend on their service level agreement with us.
Tattersalls outlets are not customers of Telstra even though we pay for the services of the telco. Tattersalls is the customer of Telstra.
Given the value of loss of sales experienced by the Tattersalls retail network, we ought to be keenly interested in the prospect of compensation for Tuesday’s Telstra network outage. It would be reasonable to expect that any compensation would be shared with Tattersalls outlets.
Our losses would include lottery product sales as well as sales lost to some customers who did not make the usual impulse purchases with lottery products.
I was surprised to discover that Telstra has not made any formal announcement about the outage given the cost to its customers.
The Cairns Post yesterday promoted a competition with an iPad as the prize. Entry was by liking the Cairns Post on Facebook.
There are a couple of things which interested me about this: The Cairns Post does not currently have an iPad app; and, it took a bit of work to find their Facebook page since the tip in the ad was inaccurate. I found the link by reading the story about the competition online.
The above points aside, a newspaper in a regional centre running a competition with an iPad as a prize is interesting. Newspaper publishers still say to newsagents that it’s business as usual. Now, three weeks into my own iPad experience, I’d say that’s not true. It is not business as usual for the distribution of news and information.
If I were involved in the Cairns Post promotion I’d make sure that my Facebook page is easily found. I’d also make sure that I have an iPad presence – to connect the promotion to innovation on the iPad. Otherwise, why promote the new distribution channel when you are not there yet?
The slow cooker cookbooks in our latest book sale are perfroming very well. It’s terrific seeing people buy two at once. We facilitate this by displaying all the slow cooker titles together. We will add the Women’s Weekly slow cooker cookbook to the mix when fresh stock arrives in a couple of days – we easily sold out more than a month ago.
We are not known for selling books as we get in an out of the category several times a year. This means that most book are purchased on impulse. Books are a key part of our basket building strategy – great margin too.
We are promoting People’s Friend at one of our counters this week. The title is a stellar performer for us, promoting it at the counter should drive some good impulse business. It’s easier to get more sales from a successful title than to labour over an underperforming title. This is five day promotion – to Monday.
I mention this tiny placement to reinforce my regular comments here about the importance of change in our newsagencies.
Magazine distributors control what newsagents are supplied, the terms under which the titles are supplied and often control when we are able to return the product. Their absolute control over the magazine supply model comes with an obligation to treat us fairly and in a way which enables us to make a living from what they supply.
Fewer newsagent make a living out of magazines than ever before.
When I took off 4 copies the old issue of Golf Magazine and replaced it with 8 copies of the new issue I wondered why Gotch increased us from 5 copies to the 8. There is no reason in our sales data. Sure I could call but I should not have to. The answer should be obvious since they have decided to risk more of my money on this extra stock – and on the last day of the month.
As I have blogged before, even one extra copy of a title which is not justified in the sales data is one copy too much- especially when you project the impact of this behaviour across the channel as a whole.
Newsagents need to match up their sales by distributor against the payments they make to each distributor over the last year and see in glorious colour the impact on cash flow of the magazine supply model. I will write more about this soon.
We are promoting the latest issue of Australian Women’s Weekly at the busiest point of our sales counter.
I chose the counter location because of the Julia Gillard profile which comes with the magazine – I expect it to sell well.
While we may lose some impulse business for the regular mix of ACP titles which would usually be in this display unit, the change will be noticed by regulars who have probably become store blind to the same old layout for the last couple of years.
The counter display is in addition to an in-location display. It is already driving good impulse business.
School holidays bring plenty of new customers to any shopping centre. We are no different and while we have some great holiday deals on our dance floor, I decided to promote the latest issue of Better Homes & Gardens along with Better Basics out the front of the store for the next few days. My reasoning is that we will see more mums shopping in the holidays who would usually be at work. These are the people we want seeing the titles.