The Pilot Friction pen TV commercial is terrific at raising awareness for this range. Leverage the TV commercial for your newsagency by promoting the range on your business Facebook page and through other marketing platforms you use. You can own this range for your newsagency in your area if you tactical in your marketing.
Check out how the Herald Sun looked for one newsagent today. The sticker stuck on the front page is for the Dr Seuss promotion. Being half stuck like this looks bad. I know plenty of customers who would look for an undamaged copy. On a copy I saw earlier today, the sticker was obscuring a chunk of the photo about the main news story. Dreadful.
What does Bauer Media need to do to become a real force again? is a must-read article for newsagents and others interested in print media businesses in Australia by Miranda Ward and published by mUmBRELLA.
I love the way this gift and card shop in the US handles an impulse purchase pitch at the counter. It makes good use of space between two customer serving locations, using what would otherwise be dead space. It pitches products easily purchased by those close to the counter.
I think it is important the unit is curved. That makes it easier to navigate, easier to shop and less visually harsh in my view.
It is the type of unit that could be made and pushed up against the counter without being built-in, without costing too much money.
Many newsagency counters I see are old school, pitching a product mix that has not changed in years, achieving little in the way of impulse purchases at the counter, most likely not contributing appropriately for the premium space allocated.
The approach shown in the photo shows how one retailer has created new space to achieve a better financial return from expensive counter space. I think it is worth a try.
My advice to any newsagent considering something like this is – don;t use a shopfitter and their shares are likely to be considerably higher than if you purchased the item from a cheap furniture place or had a local hippie knock something up.
Spend as little as possible to trial this or any other similar future idea you have for your business.
I have been contacted by the publishers of a soon to launch publication, The Freeman Journal, seeking expressions of interest in receiving copies for free, which can be sold.
Click here to see a mock up. [I removed this because of the comments you can read below.] There is more information at their website.
While this title is not for me, I thought I would share it here for others to consider.
Here is the note from the publisher:
My name is Jack Freeman and I am the director of a luxury online and a soon to be released quarterly distributed print publication The Freeman Journal. With an elite and targeted audience of high net worth individuals, aspirational luxury consumers and frequent travellers.
Thus we were contacting you as we are in the coming months releasing our first quarterly edition and were looking to send free editions to Newsagents across Australia to which may be sold on behalf of agents entirely.
Let me know if interested to participate. I have attached our Media Kit and Mock Up First Edition.
This morning’s Daily Telegraph shows, once again, how irrelevant newspaper headlines are deemed y newspaper publishers in promoting their product.
It surprises me they treat promotion of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here with more respect than they do what the editorial team considers to be the main news story of the day – our country’s treatment of babies held in the asylum system. Those making such decisions ought to be ashamed of themselves.
The stand of $3 Valentine’s Day cards at Woolworths that I saw yesterday was in the high traffic ground floor entrance location of the Sydney CBD business while the higher priced Valentine’s Day cards were in the second floor card department. While I get that supermarkets are interested in what they say is a ‘value’ pitch, it is not, in my view, value in that the cards look and feel cheap compared to the regular priced cards.
Unfortunately, I suspect we will see more and more of these ‘value’ pitches the greeting card category this year and beyond. It is an overseas trend retailers here will not want to ignore.
There are too many ‘value’ models in the UK and US for Australia to not be confronted by this phenomenon. It is only a matter of time before it hits here. I have looked at two of the models in detail may have more to say about them soon.
In Sydney yesterday it seemed to me that every second bus I passed was advertising large capacity printers from Epson. The signs promoted a two year life for the ink provided with the printer. Epson is not alone in pushing this model.
Newsagents with considerable ink sales need to be aware of the trend and to factor this into their business planning.
Click here to download communication from Network services for newsagents on the timing of the closure of the business. I share it here with permission.
The processes outlined by the company are clear cut. Achieving a refund of any money owed requires newsagents to provide bank details. The way things go with this channel there will be newsagents who ignore this request and then complain they have not received a refund.
Please follow the advice in the Network document.
I feel for Allan and Stella Wickham, the owners of newsXpress Eli Waters, the business where the winning ticket in the $70M Powerball jackpot was purchased. I feel for them because they are attracting nutters from around the country, people approaching them because they think they got a great payout as a percentage of the $70M . They are also being approached to get them to put people in touch with the winners.
People have requests for a share of the money for charities and all sorts of crazy plans.
It does not help when Allan and Stella say they did not get a percentage or they cannot connect with the winner for private reasons. People persist. Even today, weeks after the win.
While it would be easy to laugh off the interruptions, they are so considerable that they get in the way of everyday business.
So, I feel for Allan and Stella – and any other newsagent hit by similar circumstances. However, the $70M prize is a record for a single winner.
In 2007 by newsagency at Forest Hill sold a $11M winning ticket in Powerball. It was a house syndicate we created. There were plenty who were sure we had a share in the syndicate so there was that to deal with as well as the nuttiness of some of the syndicate members who wanted their share the next day even though we had to wait the two weeks and then pass the month through our account – yes that is the way Tatts did it then.
While I like the model I have seen in some overseas locations of the selling business getting a small percentage of a major jackpot, it would bring with it problems beyond the nutters newsagents selling winning tickets have to face today.
Since News Corp. continues to favour Coles with pricing of $6.00 for Inside Out magazine I see no reason to promote the more expensive newsagency version priced at $8.20. This long-term campaign by News disrespects newsagents and shows the desire of News Corp. to switch shoppers from our small business channel to the giant Coles.
With the Facebook user community continuing to grow – 1.5b monthly users in Q4 2015 – it is a vitally important place to promote your business and the brand under which you trade. Promoting on Facebook is an easy way to reach people outside your business to attract them in. It is also an easy marketing platform through which to track engagement results including demographic information.
Here are numbers from this morning of people who like or follow the corporate page of the newsagency banner groups:
These numbers are important as they speak to the base community easily reached by each of the groups when promoting offers and opportunities available in member businesses.
The numbers themselves need to be considered a springboard as plenty of Facebook users share posts they like to friends who, in turn, can share to their friends. In one recent promotion for which I have data the ripple effect reached an additional 15,000 people.
Note: I could only find one Newspower national page and it had not been updated since August last year. If anyone is aware of another page please let me know.
The TV commercial from News Corp’s Herald Sun promoting the Dr Seuss book series lists three supermarkets by brand yet lists newsagents as, well, newsagents. The folks at News ought to respect brands newsagents trade under more than this. Their failure to list the brands demonstrates a preference for the supermarket brands in my view.
Here is a photo from the TVC – listing the supermarkets.
This photo shows part of the stationery department of a store I visited in Nuremberg last week. I am sharing it as it represents a different approach to stationery layout compared to what we see in newsagencies and other stationery retailers in Australia.
I like the consistent fixture colour and that it does not detract from the product itself. I also like the lower height units at the front and their use for uplifting products, to draw the shopper into the department.
I draw plenty of inspiration from this photo.
I was in Germany for four days last week on business and got to see a range of newsagency and related businesses. I saw two types of businesses: small, almost kiosk like in size, shops with around 50 magazine titles and convenience lines; and, large format stores in high traffic locations like railway stations and shopping malls or precincts.
Based on what I saw, Germans love their magazines and newspapers.
The photo below is from the entrance to a shop in Munich. I saw this same type of entrance in several shops. I like that it is open, easy to see around the whole shop.
Here is the entrance to another shop. The same approach: a low profile display unit for volume titles in the entrance.
Here is the entrance to another magazine shop in Munich.
Here is the extraordinary range in the kids magazine section in a magazine shop in Nuremberg railway station:
TV and related titles:
Weeklies from a Munich store.
Crossword titles from a Munich store.
Newspapers in a the business in the Nuremberg railway station.
Looking a plenty of retail in Germany, magazines are not as readily available in Germany as in Australia but most of the shops that do sell them have an extraordinary range of titles. The bigger shops have more than double the magazine range we have. This stands to reason with the German population more than three times that of Australia.
I do wonder if the size of the range of magazines in the bigger stores is a function of there being fewer such stores.
I picked up plenty over the course of the week, not only in relation to magazines but in other product categories important to us.
