Fairfax lumped a triple whammy against their brand and newsagents yesterday by attacking The Saturday Age. The first issue is that they whacked a garish post it note type ad across the newspaper masthead. This cheapens the brand. They do it because these ads sell I guess. The message, however, is that their brand does not matter all that much. The second issue is that the ad was a subscription offer. Why use my shop and goodwill to take customers away from me? I make little enough of newspapers as it is. This campaign offering a 65% discount is offensive. The third issue is that they are promoting their newspaper a home delivery campaign which contradicts a campaign tthey have asked newsagents to promote, a campaign for which they provided distribution newsagents flyers for recently.
What a mix up. Makes me wonder who is in charge, where they see their brand in 20 years and whether they really care about newsagents.
As a distribution agent, it is in my interest for this sort of offer to be heavily promoted, even at the expense of my sub-agents.
However even I can see that the next step is to convert the subscription customers to digital customers.
The Age and the Herald Sun’s real aim is to cut us out of the loop completely, regardless of what they say.
We removed them in store,
Dean,
I really feel you are drawing a long bow by saying HWT and The Age want to cut us out of the loop.
For a start for that to happen there would need to be a mass migration to digital and this will not happen desite skeptics like you saying it will.
Mr and Mrs old aged average citizen will still desire home delivery and when newspapers are needed in the event of world events they will still come to our shop.
News papers accounted for less than 10% of my sales last quarter. They are not core business for me and make a farce of the moniker “Newsagency”. Magazines, at over 20% of sales are the department that justify the newsagency title for my business.
From my point of view, the newspapers will get only the support they earn by treating us as their primary distribution method. They are currently failing in this area and do not earn the importance we give them in our businesses.
I have to agree with Dean that the long term will model will move to digital media. At some point hopefully well int the future, print will not be viable and we will be cut off at the knees.
Proactive,
While in the short time you are right, you are wrong in the long term.
Older people read the papers, but younger people do not, and if they do read the news they are more likely to do so online.
This means that the economics of maintaining a distribution network of newspapers is in the long term unsustainable. It should be OK for a few years yet, but the profitability of a distribution network both for a publisher and also for the newsagent will detoriate every year, until at some point newsagents refuse to continue their round and will be unable to sell or give it away. I have seen signs that this is starting to happen now. My understanding is that there are parts of Brisbane now where you cannot get your paper home delivered.
The newspaper publishers have been watching what is happening both in Australia and overseas, and they have no alternative but to go down the digital road, cutting us out of the loop, in order to keep their business.
Just look at the education offer made by The Age this year. For $22.50 you could get The Age delivered to your school every school day, or to your inbox. How long will it be before it affects our Age sales to the point where school income is almost gone. This is income that helps prop up the rest of our round.
I can see papers being available in shops for far longer than they will be home delivered. There will come a point where you cannot get your paper home delivered.