A blog on issues affecting Australia's newsagents, media and small business generally. More ...

Month: November 2012

Terrific Christmas card range La La Land

I love the range of Christmas cards released by Australian company La La Land. We received our stock late last week.  These wonderful cards from Australian and international illustrators are visually fresh and well made. Customers love their point of difference. I love the point of difference.  Customers also love that they are made in Australia and eco-friendly … yes I have had shoppers comment on this.

While major card companies rightfully dominate space allocation and sales in our stores, some fringe companies can help us drive revenue we otherwise may have missed. They achieving by producing products that speak to a consumer who may not shop the major brand. La La land, for example, speaks to the frankie magazine buyer. With frankie being such a good selling magazine in our business it’s natural we want to help that customer spend more with us.

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Greeting Cards

The paywall challenge for newspapers

The Guardian published a report today on website access for Britain’s newspapers. The News International titles come off badly – because of their pay walls according to the report. It would be interesting to see data for The Herald Sun.

Charging for something readily available elsewhere for free was always going to be a challenge.

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Media disruption

Sunday management tip: turn the unknown into the known

I get to see sales data from many newsagencies and one of the most frustrating lines in sales data is a line labelled as unknown. This is where the software does not know what has been sold. Most often, it is because the sale has been done as what is a called a department sale. The sales person presses, say, stationery, and enters the amount for an item. While this does track the sale as stationery, it does not track the item itself.

There is a cliché saying: you can’t manage what you don’t track. The thing is … this saying is true.

Every department sale, where a physical item is not tracked specifically, is an opportunity for fraud. It is also a missed opportunity to know about your business and therefore to make better business decisions.

Most concerning of all is the message that a department sale gives your employees. It tells them that you don;t respect data. They can take this as leadership and not respect your data too. We need to lead by example in our businesses. respecting business data is an important part of this.

There are no excuses for department sales, for using a computer system as a glorified cash register.

Get rid of the department sale and you will reduce the opportunity for theft, know more about your business, save time through fewer keystrokes, save mistakes through fewer keystrokes and be a better newsagent.

Your software company should be able to help you eliminate department sales. It’s easy.

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Management tip

Sunday marketing tip: price compare where you can

We know from consumer research by several organisations that Australian consumers think newsagencies are expensive places to shop. While I think it is too difficult for us to address this nationally, some newsagents can address it locally.

If you are in a high street situation and unencumbered by landlord rules, why not choose some common everyday items and regularly price check against national competitors located nearby. I tried this in a couple of shopping centre situations and each time the landlord pointed out the lease clauses my action breached. High street newsagency leases should not have such restrictions.

While there is the risk that the chain you target strikes back, if you are not rude and promote the price comparison in a professional and consistent way you could slowly educate local shoppers to change their shopping habits and that has to be a key goal for any newsagent.

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marketing

Read Mark Colvin’s excellent Andrew Olle lecture

I urge newsagents to read the edited version of the Andrew Olle lecture delivered Friday night by Mark Colvin, respected journalist and presenter of ABC radio’s flagship PM program. Colvin gets to the heart of challenges facing journalism and media outlets, he talks about facts and truth … and makes a lot of sense. The last paragraph sums up the core message:

If we want a world where journalists can be paid to tell the truth we have to negotiate these massive changes at the same time. Good journalism – journalism of integrity – is a social good and an essential part of democracy. We have to do everything we can to try to preserve it.

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Ethics

Chasing superdraw sales online

OzLotteries make it easy to buy a ticket for tonight’s $21 million and Tuesday’s $100+ million. Their website delivers a compelling pitch as does their email campaign. Click on the image to see the email I received yesterday. They are doing what they need to do. I love their pitch even though it frustrates me.

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Lotteries

Quick survey on customer and employee theft in newsagencies

I have created a three-question survey on customer and employee theft in newsagencies this year compared to last year. I’ll leave this up until Monday afternoon.

To take the survey please click here. It will only take a few seconds.

Every week over the last few months I have taken calls from newsagents facing sizeable theft situations. Talking with someone yesterday I had the idea it would be good to harvest more data about the extent of the two key types of theft in a newsagency. Hence the survey.

The survey software (Survey Monkey) doesn’t track your details, you can respond anonymously and it only allows one response per computer.

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theft

Pitching The Monthly with newspapers

We are pitching The Monthly with newspapers because of the terrific cover and the story headline: The Honest Woman. This cover will polarise shoppers, that’s why we wanted it in a higher than usual traffic location. I am confident we will a sales boost as a result.

This is how we can grow sales of some magazines, by being tactical in our placement and engaging in pursuit of impulse purchases. I see plenty of cases where this works to the benefit of the newsagent and the publisher.

6 likes
magazines

McHappy Day opportunity with New idea

10 cents of every copy of next week’s New Idea sold will be donated to the McHappy Day campaign run by McDonalds. The fund raising goal this year is $3.6 million. Connecting us with the campaign through the New Idea donation is a good reason to give the magazine extra attention.

We know from boxed Christmas card and Mother’s Day card sales the value of a charity tie in and newsagents often push this with extra collateral. Our plan in my stores is to draw attention to the charity component of a New Idea purchase next week.

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Newsagency opportunities

Being positive about magazines

Check out the video from a couple of days ago shot at the Australian Magazine Awards were Ita Buttrose was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Watch Ita talk up magazines beautifully.

I love her positive attitude about a product so important to us. Yes, she discusses digital products – but in context.

9 likes
magazines

Christmas purchases kicking in

Almost as if following direction, shopper interest turned 90 degrees to Christmas this week. Without considerably changing product placement and disc plays, Christmas related purchases took off. Cards were the biggest beneficiary of the interest in Christmas for us. Our major Christmas offer goes out over early next week. We’ll get done what we can on the weekend given the strong showing ver the last couple of days.

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retail

T2020 coverage on ABC radio

ABC local radio in Brisbane this morning covered the T2020 newspaper distribution changes being driven by News Limited. You can hear the audio here. Alf Maccione, CEO of the ANF and Tony Philbrick from Southbank Beach News were interviewed.

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Newspapers

Newsagents shift 800 magazine sales to supermarkets

I was talking with a magazine publisher recently about early returns and they shared this story.

1,000 copies of a mid-tier magazine were returned by newsagents the day they arrived in-store. Most were returned by newsagents who would usually sell out or at least come very close to selling out. In almost every case the newsagents left themselves with less stock than their most recent average sales.

On seeing the 1,000 early returns, the publisher decided to reallocate the stock to supermarkets. 800 copies of the 1,000 copies sold.

The newsagents who early returned their stock helped 800 shoppers buy the title in supermarkets. This could have these shoppers looking for the title in that channel in the future. The newsagent action also encouraged the publisher to pay more attention to supermarkets.

There are consequences for early returns beyond getting your magazine bill down, consequences for all of the channel.

I don’t want newsagents to lose magazine sales we should not lose. Our future depends on the extraordinary traffic magazines generate for us. We need to ‘protect’ this traffic by not losing a single certain magazine sale.

12 likes
magazines

Officeworks sells stamps?

Maybe I missed this but Officeworks sells postage stamps and they’re promoting this in a new email campaign pitching their business as a complete one stop shop for pack and post services. The email is impressive and is set to be appreciated by their business targets.

Newsagents need to watch the stationery space carefully. There can be no doubt that it is in play. Officeworks are improving their business ahead of Staples expanding their retail footprint further.

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Stationery

Excellent Halloween sales numbers

Halloween ended for us yesterday with sales up more than 100% on last year. This is a good result off of strong numbers from a year before. It’s financially more valuable for us than Father’s Day – not only because of the numbers directly for the season but because of other items halloween shoppers purchased.

It’s the basket efficiency of Halloween that I really like.

Up until mid Wednesday we were not discounting. In the end, we sold out and that was our goal. We ended up bringing in considerably more stock than planned – once we saw how this season was behaving compared to previous years. It was good to see our original sales forecast blown out of the water.

I am confident that some shoppers visiting us for the first time because of Halloween will be back soon.

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newsagency marketing

Home and Away 25th anniversary special set to drive sales

The one-shot magazine celebrating the 21st anniversary of Home and Away sold very well. I expect the one-shot celebrating 25 years will do just as well. It comes out Monday and pacific magazines is supporting this with plenty of marketing including ads and social media. I like the pre-sale promotional flyers provided to newsagents yesterday for customisation and printing in-store. We have set aside prime space to go hard promoting this opportunity. We will use it to pull traffic to the store and to extend the basket. Pacific announced details late yesterday to nexus marketing program members.

4 likes
magazines

Promoting Melbourne Cup connections

We are promoting That’s Life at the counter as part of a range of Melbourne Cup related promotions in-store this week and next. The $30,000 race-themed price is a perfect opportunity to pitch the title for impulse purchase and that’s what we are doing with this counter placement as well as heightened promotion in the usual location for the title. We have other Melbourne Cup themes promotions too.

0 likes
magazines

Nice Gourmet Traveller cover

I like the cover of the latest issue of Gourmet Traveller magazine. It’s got good visual cut-through and stands out from the crowd of food titles in-store at the moment. We have it placed to make sure that the full cover is on display. the contract in colours from the masthead itself is terrific.

3 likes
magazines

Author publishes Halloween story on Twitter

There is no better example of how authors can embrace social media than what Children’s author R. L. Stine, author of  the Goosebumps series, did with a Halloween story published yesterday. Check it out.  Across a series of Tweets to his 61,000 followers he told a terrific story for Halloween.

How is this relevant to newsagents? The world is changing, our world is changing. This story illustrates it.  A couple of years ago we would have laughed at the idea of what R. L. Stine has just done.

We need to make sure we worry about the right things and embrace change for our benefit.

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Media disruption

Gifted Bear switch hurts sales

Our sales of Gifted Bears from Skansen have fallen following the switch to the new display unit and the separation of the package.

Whereas in the past shoppers could make one decision to purchase a bear as a gift for birthday, graduation or some other life event, now, shoppers have to choose the bear and the top to place on the bear to create the desired package. Also, the new completed bear costs close to 50% more than the older product.

The Skansen response has been to advise us to dress some bears ready to purchase.

I expected the new stand to work well and happily took it on. It hasn’t. Not only for the reasons noted above but also because of the size and design. It is taking up too much space and acting as a physical barrier to traffic flow.

I think Skansen needs to take the Gifted Bear offer back to where it was in terms of packaging and price point. Either way, we are removing the current stand and two-step purchase process.

I like Skansen as a company and I love most of their products. On this Gifted Bear move, they have got it wrong for me.

10 likes
Newsagency management

Black Caviar opportunity

The timing of the latest issue of Vogue is perfect with Black caviar featuring on the cover. Out tomorrow in NSW, VIC and QLD metro, supply has been increased, especially in Victoria where Melbourne Cup fever is in full swing.

We will promote this issue of Vogue in a high-traffic position to attract those who may not usually buy the title.  This cover an an excellent opportunity.

3 likes
magazines

Bump a welcome new pregnancy magazine

Bump has arrived at a good time since this is a season for pregnancy or so it seems – I know so many people pregnant at the moment. Amazing.  We are promoting Bump by ensuring the full cover is on display with other baby and pregnancy titles – it needs this as it’s a smaller format title and could get lost in traditional magazine fixturing. We also plan to give it time with either weeklies or younger women’s magazines to give it a shot in the spotlight.

2 likes
magazines

Reader’s Digest selling well

We have noticed the current issue of Reader’s Digest magazine selling particularly well, ahead of sales for the title by this pint in the on-sale.

We are displaying Reader’s Digest in the same way as usual. Maybe it’s the free book with this issue.

1 likes
magazines
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