I have been asked to help find a candidate with good marketing skills and a knowledge of the newsagency channel for a role in Sydney. If you know someone, please email me at mark@towersystems.com.au or have them contact me through my LinkedIn profile.
I have been in Sydney overnight and based on the long queues I saw at lottery outlets here yesterday, it will take retail skill and relentless focus for newsagents selling lotteries to leverage the traffic surge this week into purchases of other products with a lottery purchase. It’s a week of opportunity.
I am speaking at the VANA conference in Victoria today, offering an updated and edited version of my Newsagency of the Future presentation. It’s been interesting cutting a 2 hour workshop into the allotted 30 minutes. I have cut it right back to the meat, the call to action. This starts with the questions on the slide – click on the image to see the detail. These are vital questions we must answer for ourselves.
We are accountable for own future. We need to stop going cap in hand to suppliers. We need to stop expecting someone else to write and support a business plan for our business. Our product suppliers will not provide us with our future.
ParcelPoint continues to attract attention from retailers keen to offer a wide-spread parcel collection service. This interest is helped by newsagent engagement.
Here is an update from ParcelPoint activity:
ParcelPoint has been growing steadily with a great response from newsagents and other businesses around the country. With our focus on Sydney and Melbourne, we now have over 70% coverage of online shoppers in these 2 regions. Other
- We are working with a number of carriers around the country, as all can deliver to our locations, including Australia Post and Toll.
- We now have almost 1,000 Agents around the country providing a great, convenient service to online shoppers.
- Fastway now using our network for failed deliveries in Sydney, Melbourne and Central Coast with more to rollout shortly
- We launched a returns service in early October in Sydney, with Melbourne coming on in first week of November. We have 15 retailers signed up initially as we work with our ParcelPoint locations to roll this out further.
- We are starting our Consumer awareness activity now with a number of promotions focused around the retailers we have integrated, including targeted promotions around our ParcelPoint locations. One of our CBD located agents, negotiated with the property manager of the building they are in to send an email to all tenants in the building announcing they are a ParcelPoint Agent, with parcel volumes growing by 5 times from the previous weeks.
- We have released our 3rd iteration of our technology platform in response to feedback from our Agent locations
While we have seen many groups consider offering a service to solve one of the key frustrations of parcel delivery, we are the only one providing a carrier agnostic service focused on solving the customer’s issues, not the carrier’s problems. This has a key benefit for each Agent location with directing new customers to your store with the potential to turn them into repeat customers.
We are promoting The Friendship Book 2013 edition with placement above our weekly magazines and next to our English magazines. This is a popular title for us, especially with early in the Christmas season purchases as a gift.
We have found it important to get the title in front of shoppers as it is not something they will hunt down this early in the season.
We are featuring the Christmas issue of Family Circle magazine between food titles and home & living titles. We also have stock located with our weeklies to chase impulse purchases from shippers who don’t shop right down the women’s magazine aisle.
We treat Family Circle as one-shot and this works for us. This means we give it extra support, especially in the first two or three weeks of the on-sale. Our sell through in 90% and often above.
The pilot sale of Moshi Monster game cards and iTunes cards from InComm and vended through the Tower and POS newsagency software has been a terrific success.
I first got involved in this in the middle of last year and was confident that the newsagency channel would be a good fit for the InComm products. It has proven to be a good fit with terrific sales and nice extra margin dollars for newsagents.
InComm, through Touch Networks has announced today more opportunities for newsagents:
Expanded Product Range
InComm will be providing you a suite of popular online game cards suitable for all ages, many of which are exclusive to InComm and available to you by Touch Networks, via Tower Systems and POS Solutions.Fixtures
Various fixtures and display options available to you, free of charge. Just let InComm know what you need by downloading and returning the Order Form. Alternatively you are welcome to display these on any fixtures you own or on slat wall, with hooks.Popularity of Gaming: Did you know…..
95% of homes with kids under 18 are playing computer games.
75% of Adults are also playing games online, PC or mobile.
The Australian games industry is forecasted to reach $2.5 Billion in 2015.
InComm wants you to part of this growth!InComm will be providing you with a suite of new, popular and exclusive titles that are:
- Suitable for all ages – something for everyone
- Self use – repeat purchases
- Gift ideas – birthday, Christmas, stocking filler
- Range of price points – pocket money prices up to $100!
- Suit all interests – fun, education, social networking
- New products being added all the time
- Great margins offered across the range
Newsagents keep to get the InComm products should make contact with Touch Networks. I’ll help anyone having difficulty navigating this.
The South Australian government has signed a contract with two multi-national stationery suppliers, ignoring an opportunity to support small businesses like newsagents. The ABC has the story.
I don;t know why I am surprised that a politician fails to support small business. This is how it’s been in Australia for decades with successive state and federal governments. They have been quick to say how important small business is and slow to back their words with action.
Labour, Liberal and National Party politicians have consistently failed small businesses, like newsagents, in Australia. Yet we vote for them. More fool us. If we were serious about wanting governments to support small business, as our core issue, then we would lead a campaign across our counters at the next federal and state elections. We won’t, however, because we will prefer to complain than to actually do something about chaning the situation.
Shame on you South Australian government, shame. This is a socially irresponsible decision.
Okay, so what should government do? If they support Australia as they often say they will, they should be required to support Australian businesses ahead of others and small businesses ahead of others. These requirements should be mandated in a way that is fair for taxpayers.
My sense is that small businesses are more likely to invest in local communities. The knock-on economic benefit of governments proactively supporting small business would / cold be considerable.
The politicians, however, will only support small business if it is in their interests to at the ballot box.
I was thrilled to participate as a judge for the shortlisting of magazine covers for this year’s 2012 consumer awards, The Maggies. We had close to 200 magazines covers to judge last Friday in Sydney to select a shorlist in eleven categories.
This year was the first time a newsagent was represented on the judging panel. It was fascinating hearing what magazine publishing and other media experts looked for in a good cover design. The day also provided an excellent opportunity for networking and, from my perspective, talking about the value proposition newsagents offer over other magazine retailers.
I urge newsagents to VOTE NOW for their favourite cover. Voting is open to anyone.
We have had the Snowman Christmas ornaments on the shop floor for less than two weeks and they are selling very well. In fact, we are reordering to ensure we can sell deeper into the Christmas season.
What’s interesting in this success story is that we have the stand half-way in the store, near our magazine department, since we have had Halloween in the front.
They are working beautifully as a basket builder, adding valuable margin dollars to sales.
We have the latest issue of men’s style magazine with the full cover on show to leverage the shot of Modern Family star Sofia Vergara. The Vergara cover should get more people picking it up than usual.
We are also giving GQ excellent positioning because of the Daniel Craig cover and the release of the new James Blond movie.
We have the New Idea Pantene giveaway this week and have decided to run fanned out as shown in the photo in a couple of locations in-store. This placement at the counter as well as the usual location for the title does take up more space but it also shows off the bonus value with this issue. I see this as an opportunity for us to promote a point of difference over others nearby selling the magazine.
I like now the giveaway is tied to supporting women with cancer.
I urge newsagents to watch Australian Story on ABC1 tonight. It takes us behind the recent wave of redundancies at Fairfax and, in particular, The Sydney Morning Herald. the preview I have seen is compelling.
Fairfax used VANA to announce that the country edition of The Age would not be produced today and that the metro edition could be challenged or not produced at all. I’m not sure why the publisher did not make the announcement directly. Their website gets plenty of visitors – more than VANA. I can’t see any announcement on The Age website this morning.
Publishers have a history of using newsagent associations to distribute news they themselves should distribute.
A couple of tweets indicate the announcement form VANA may have been misunderstood.
We have not returned any stock of the Girlfriend branded One Direction part series from Pacific Magazines and this weekend we saw the value in having the full series available and on-show. I personally saw our display drive impulse purchases two of which were worth more than $20.00 in part series titles.
I know of newsagents who have early-returned stock of these titles. While the early return opportunity is embedded in the model, I have no doubt that interest in this series is far from satiated. Yesterday, one set was purchased by a grandparent for a grandchild and the other was purchased by a parent who had finally given in – she told me she’d resisted for weeks but had not given up. I was happy with that.
Our social media campaign promoting the series is also showing that interest in the series remains strong. Several fans have said they are buying second copies of the series – one to read and another to collect. I hadn’t thought about this, that people could purchase multiple sets.
On eBay I found mint condition issue #1 is priced at $24.99 plus postage.
The set from Pacific Magazines is also helping calendar sales – we’re past 150 copies of that sold, adding around $4,000 to the One Direction related sales this year.
I plan is to keep the five-part set in-store for the entire on-sale. The indication is that it will easily pay its way.
With Halloween selling so well we had to consolidate all product to one display. This freed up space at the counter. We filled the available space with a carefully selected range of magazine titles like to work well in this impulse purchase location. It worked a treat with magazines being added to the basket at the sales counter.
Too much time in the newsagency channel is spent complaining about what we can’t do when every day there are (even small) moves we can make to drive success.
There are many different types of loyalty systems and loyalty offers in retail businesses and in Australian newsagencies. Too often, I see newsagents and small and independent retailers more generally implement a loyalty system and make expensive mistakes.
Here are some tips for successfully implementing a loyalty program based on my experiences in my own retail businesses and experiences working with retailers in other channels including some who have implemented more sophisticated and networked solutions than any in the newsagency channel.
I started the newsagency channel’s longest running loyalty program in 2004. It’s still running today and is a key factor in above average performance in participating stores. It meets the eight points noted above.
The back end of managing a loyalty system is complex. It takes sophisticated software to leverage the real value of collected basket data. This is where major national retail chains do well – their pockets are deep and they have suppliers who will fund the work because of the value of the data.
McDonald’s Canada is set to sell bags of ground coffee in a further change to the model of the fast food business. read the excellent article on this published by the Canadian Financial Post – it goes into the background for the move.
Look back at McDonald’s and the moves they have made over the last ten years and you see a company that does not wait for disruption to impact their business. Okay there may be a couple of instances – but in the main McDonald’s has sought out change and played with their traditional business model. They have done this in various outpost locations, including Australia.
Other retailers are doing this too. Look at Cotton On, a well-established fashion retail brand in Australia and not they have Typo, it’s like Smiggle for grown-ups. They sought change to effectively disrupt their traditional business.
The management question every newsagent would benefit from asking themselves today is: what am I doing right now to disrupt my business model, to break from tradition and to pursue change in my newsagency?
The future of newsagencies in Australia depends more on this than any action by any supplier.
I continue to be asked about another round of the Newsagency of the Future workshop series. My plan at this stage is to host a completely new and considerably more action-oriented session early in 2013. This will have greater urgency and will reflect some significant shifts in retail.
A version of the existing workshop is available at YouTube:
It’s had 524 views and the series itself was seen live by more than 750 people including a couple of conferences this year so far.
The current issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly is the first with a male on the cover in fifteen years. It will be interesting to see how much Hugh Jackman helps them move stock. We have been supporting the title with several locations including placement with newspapers. Sales are okay, no spike at this stage but it’s early in the on-sale.
Up through to the end of today we have AWW in four locations. That will be pulled back from tomorrow.
Click here to see the updated FAQs from News Limited T2020 and here to see the letter sent earlier this week. I have spoken with Catrin Thomas this week and am assured that News is genuinely listening to and engaging with newsagents through this trial in Queensland. I saw this happen first-hand earlier this week between a newsagent and News to address a concern over the recently announced delay.
Having been involved in this process since it began three years ago I’d note that the approach of News over the last six months is completely different – more engaged with newsagents, more flexible and more transparent – than in the two and a half years prior. It is good to see News working direct with newsagents. This is a project to be worked on operationally by the contracted parties and not through a third party.
I have a vested interest in T2020 with 1,700+ newsagents using my Tower Systems newsagency software, many of whom offer home deliveries. I have no deal with News.
I understand what they are doing and why. It is necessary structural change. Many newsagents saw it coming years ago and made appropriate business decisions. While this is not an I told you so, I’d note that I sold my newspaper home delivery run in late 2006. I explained here why I did it and what I thought would happen with runs. Associations and brokers had this same information. Industry leaders had the information too. Yet many let newsagents steam ahead thinking it was business as usual for newspaper home delivery.
Newsagents are complaining about News Limited and what they are doing with T2020 should look back at themselves and the newsagent leaders over the years and ask why they did not act before.
News Limited announced yesterday some upcoming changes for the printing of newspapers from its Port Melbourne site. Ultimately, they will move from six presses to four. Newsagents will naturally be nervous about this and the potential for impact on distribution times. The first changes will occur on Saturdays, from November 12.
We were fortunate to receive a floor display unit for promoting Better Homes and Gardens and we are making the most of it. We have placed the unit near the counter, next to our busy photocopier. After a week here we will place it at the front of the store, facing into the shopping mall.
We also have Better Homes and Gardens located with newspapers as well as in the usual location for the title. Sales are strong – we’re seeing excellent growth as has been the case for most of the year with this title for us.
I want to mention the display unit – it’s physically strong. This is important especially in the Christmas season with traffic up and things getting knocked about.