Making the most of product tags
One of the important tasks when tidying on the shop floor during busy seasons such as christmas is to ensure that all product tags and labels are set to fully inform shoppers. This makes browsing easier and, with an especially good tag, improves the chances of sales success. Take the tag for this bottle bag from Hallmark – if the tag was left inside the bag browsers not taking notice might miss what the product actually is. The shape of the tag and the text make browsing the item easier and enhance the prospects of purchase.
So, we ensure that our team members know to not only tidy products but also ensure that useful tags, like this one, are showing.
Hobbit movie driving sales
In addition to Hobbit branded products we are pushing the various magazines with Hobbit cover stories and they’re selling well. I urge newsagents to make sure they have the magazines next to each other, with the full covers on show and in a location those who would not usually purchase these titles will find them. They’re all selling well! … another way we can grow magazine sales.
Newsagents engage in practical early return discussion
A group of newsagents met online on Thursday to discuss magazine management including early returns. It was a practical round table discussion of the processes people follow and how to undertake early returns based on sales data as well as how to set your software to suggest early returns based on recent sales history.
What was interesting was that unlike many magazine discussions, this one was about business and practical steps – without the usual emotion associated with magazine supply.
This meeting was facilitated through my newsagency software company and open to anyone as promoted here.
Selling out of Christmas craft magazines
We’ve experienced a terrific run on our Christmas-themed craft titles. We only limited sock left. we facilitates the run with front of display full-face promotion of all Christmas themed craft titles. Year on year we are well ahead. For a small effort we are showing another way we can grow magazine sales.
Tapping into another brand … Spiderman
Another benefit of selling the Hallmark Christmas ornaments is the brand connection Hallmark delivers. take the Spiderman ornament, this is a must-have for Spiderman fans and something that will generate good word of mouth for us.
We are promoting the range on one of our gift tables facing into the shopping mall – to maximise the brand recognition opportunity.
This ornament range connects with our commitment to the collectible shopper, a valuable shopper and one I’d encourage more newsagents to connect with.
Promoting yen
We are promoting the latest issue of yen with the full cover on show including the bonus cd gift – their 10th birthday mix tape. yen is another title, like frankie, appealing to an important demographic for us and thereby delivering value before the sale of the title itself.
We have the magazine in full-face display so shoppers can see the free CD.
I’d be surprised if Coles paid to advertise Woman’s Day
The Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph today have quarter page ads promoting the special issue of Woman’s Day as available from Coles supermarkets.
I doubt Coles paid for these ads.
My understanding is that Coles product advertising is funded by suppliers. I guess ACP paid for the ad. If true, shame on ACP for treating their retail channels differently and for ignoring newsagents, their most valuable retail channel.
I can see why Coles would have asked for funding – because ACP wanted them to do something beyond the usual with the weekly title. Whereas newsagents will invest their own time and space in these special issues, supermarkets only engage if they are compensated for what they consider to be extra work.
I’d love ACP to comment on this.
Facebook not the platform for business we thought it would be
For a while now I have been questioning the value of Facebook as a marketing platform for business. Their constant changes of what shows in the news feed and changes to business rules have made the platform frustrating.
While it is terrific to get plenty of likes for your Facebook page and there are some who successfully use this to communicate with their customer community, there is a growing community of people concerned with where facebook is headed.
Mark Cuban, Chairman of the Dallas Mavericks and Chairman of HD Net, wrote about this recently at The Huffington Post. He gets to the heart of what Facebook in:
Facebook is what it is. It’s a time waster. That’s not to say we don’t engage — we do. We click, share and comment because it’s mindless and easy. But for some reason Facebook doesn’t seem to want to accept that its best purpose in life is as a huge time-suck platform that we use to keep up with friends, interests and stuff. I think that they are overthinking what their network is all about.
As far as a platform for reaching out to uncover new customers for any of my newsagencies, I am finding Twitter to be a far more useful and less costly platform. I am also able to more easily see the reach of what I put on Twitter than Facebook. That said, I’ll still use Facebook to connect with existing customers. We do live, after all, in a world with more routes to market than ever before.
I mention this today as there are social media experts pitching their service to newsagents, saying they can help you achieve plenty of likes for your newsagency Facebook page. Do your research before you go and give them money to achieve something that may be of questionable value.
Another good collectible product
More newsagents are having good success with Golliwog products. I put them in the collectible category as this is what drives many purchases. This and nostalgia. I saw a shopper the other day purchase because she had a golliwog as a kid and wanted to introduce them to her grandkids. there was a time there would have been concerns about the political correctness of golliwogs. This is not a concern I hear expressed today.
The photo shows the range from Gibson.
We cannot get too much One Direction product
Just when we thought we were at capacity for One Direction product, more official One Direction arrived. We’d forgotten about these. We have them in this display unit at the counter as well as on the wall of One Direction product we have in-store.
I like the consistency of branding of all the items and the unit itself.
Having a complete packaging like this makes display easier and helps guide shoppers to purchase more than one item at a time.
Our two approaches with the 1D product are to fans and to those buying gifts for fans. This is working well for Christmas buying especially.
Terrific Take 5 Christmas gift tag gift
I love the free Christmas gift tags wrapped around the cover of the latest issue of Take 5 magazine. They a good value gift, a smart gift with the magazine. We have placed copies of the magazine at the counter so that shoppers can see the gift tags and hopefully purchase it on impulse.
I appreciate that the tags themselves don;t carry the Take 5 branding. This is a thoughtful move.
Promoting marie claire
We are promoting the latest marie claire with this aisle end display. The free Alex Perry nail polishes packaged with the magazine make it challenging for the pocket-type fixtures so allocating this space became essential to the merchandising of the product.
Newsagents with traditional fixtures will be displaying it flat but that will be challenging.
Condensing stationery to chase a better return
We have reduced the display space for stationery without significantly cutting the lines we have on offer.
The photo shows our main stationery aisle. The plush on the left is there to attract browsers – it faces a busy part of the shop floor. It is not the start of the aisle. To the left of the plush and out of shot is ink and our range of everyday pens. These two categories account for close to 60% of all of our stationery sales.
By reducing the floor space allocated our goal is to significantly increase to return on floor space for stationery, thereby making it more valuable in terms of our shopping centre lease costs.
We have looked carefully at what attracts shoppers to the business. The items shoppers are prepared to look for are placed appropriately. Stationery is one such item. As with many city based newsagencies, we are not the first destination for a stationery purchase. We considered this when we made these more recent changes to our stationery configuration.
Our stationery revenue was up 3% in November year on year. year to date is even better.
Moving Tattoo magazines in the newsagency, chasing sales
The team at one of my newsagencies decided tattoo magazines are better situated with photography and art titles so they moved the category. This is a significant move in that it’s across half the shop. It’s a result of careful consideration of the shoppers and the parts of the business they shop.
We see our magazine layout as quite fluid, being adjusted when we see opportunities for growth.
In this newsagency, our November 2012 magazine unit sales were up 9% on November 2011. This is significantly above the traffic growth for the store.. This tells us we’re doing something right – growing magazine sales in a market where many newsagents are recording declines.
Weekly magazines rush to leverage royal baby story
New Idea and Woman’s Day are publishing three days early, tomorrow, according to the Daily Telegraph. I was told it would be Friday. Regardless, I hope the royal pregnancy delivers a good boost – it’s certainly a reason to restate your newsagency as a magazine specialist.
UPDATE (3PM) Confirmed both for Friday. Here is the press release from ACP about the special issue. Note it has the Carols by Candlelight carol song book included so it will be of extra interest.
Enticing newsagency shoppers to return
Further to my newsagency marketing tip post on the weekend. Click here to see the flyer produced by the team at one of my stores this week. They created this themselves, based on what they think would work with the customers visiting that newsagency.
I like that they have included photos, rather than just text as I suggested, as this makes the flyer more useful if shoppers are looking at it away from the store. Picture = 1,000 words.
The flyer took a few minutes to make and provides us with an opportunity for reaching outside our newsagency with customers already familiar with us.
Retail success is achieved by many small steps (like the one percenter approach often discussed in AFL circles) more so than one or two big bold steps. This flyer is a tiny step that helps promote the business for a tiny cost.
Some newsagents can be challenging customers
As a newsagent and a supplier to newsagents I get to see our channel in action from a range of perspectives. While most engagement I encounter between newsagents and suppliers is positive and respectful, there is the rare occasion of a bad experience and, of course, it’s the experience you remember the most.
Some newsagents, very few in fact, are quick with threats against suppliers if they do not get what they want. They will say that they will tell every other newsagent that your product or service is bad unless you give them what they want. Or they will say they will complain to the association in an effort to have you accede to their request – even if the request is outside your documented trading terms.
It’s my experience that the scope and volume of the threat is the inverse of the facts of the situation. The few times I have seen or heard of this type of blackmail behaviour – I’ll hurt your company unless you give me what I want – the threats started before the dispute was even investigated and the newsagent is seeking something they to which they are not entitled – hence the over the top threats.
I experienced a situation recently, a newsagent emailed me about an issue. I said I was overseas but would rely on my person on the ground to look into it. Minutes later, they replied with an email saying they would never deal with my company again and had reported the matter to the association. The matter had not yet been investigated at my level and the amount in question was fractional compared to the decades-long relationship. They exploded too early and all because I wanted to research their complaint. The matter was complicated by them making the small purchase agreeing to the terms and conditions and the supply meeting these.
There was no other issue between us, no other history other than positive.
Because of their threat I decided to give them what they wanted. I know of other suppliers who have done the same in similar circumstances. We do it because ours is a gossip-fuelled channel where baseless gossip can harm reputations. I understand that giving in feeds the monster. It’s a judgement call that suppliers do all too often find to be necessary … unfortunately. We did this time.
Why write about this? To show that newsagent suppliers from time to time have to deal with situations that the vast majority of newsagents would never know about and to point out that a very small number of newsagents give the broader community a bad name. I also write about this to explain why some suppliers have complex account application and purchase processes.
Royal pregnancy win for New Idea
After being flogged in the last edition of Media Watch on ABC TV last week over a string of inaccurate Kate Middleton pregnancy reports, the folks at New Idea would be (and should be) feeling good about their last report being proved to be right.
Now for the weekly magazine frenzy as we watch the bump grow through to delivery. I hope the public interest delivers for us.
Promoting Top Gear as a Christmas gift
Like many newsagents in Australia, we are promoting the latest issue of Top Gear magazine to make the most of the calendar gift. This is a perfect issue for Christmas gift purchases.
We know from last year that we can achieve a 300% uplift in sales through the Christmas buying season for titles that make ideal Christmas gifts. Top Gear is one of the titles we promote this way.
Welcome interest rate move will help retailers
The latest cut in the cash rate by the RBA has come at a good time for retailers as it will further boost consumer confidence as they consider Christmas spending.
We are using the news by making sure all team members know about it and are ready to reinforce the confidence it brings.
While only small, we have seen a change this size boost shopper confidence – based on what people say and even how they act. Given the nature of our business, newsagents are likely to see a reaction sooner than some other retailers.
The Daily becomes the never
The Daily, the iPad based digital newspaper from News Corp. is closing. I agree with many commentators who observe that the closure has more to do with content and execution than the platform. It was a mainstream media product in the wrong place. News on platforms like the iPad should come from a completely different place.
Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff gets to the point:
Many business model reasons for why Daily died, but, let’s not forget, it was a dopey, tone-deaf, forgettable product
Stunning window display
I love the window display I saw for a fashion outlet in Hong Kong on the weekend. Shoppers like me stopped to admire it as if it was a work of art. Click on the image to see the detail. While I don’t have space for something like this in any of my newsagencies, I have been thinking about how I could achieve something even close with some reconfiguring.
What I especially like about the display is the setting showing an outcome for what the store sells. Their clothes would be ideal for attending a dinner like the one featured in the display.