Author: Mark Fletcher

In a first, Bauer is offering Yours readers a money back guarantee up to April 25, 2014. If they are not satisfied they complete a form online, print this, mail it with the magazine cover and Bauer will send a pre-loaded eftpos card that will have to be used within 39 days.

With a bit of thought there could have been a way to involve newsagents in this process and provide a better customer experience as a result.

This money back guarantee offer on the back of the discounted copy sold with Woman’s Day last week invites speculation about the circulate being achieved for the title.

The latest Australian Traveller out yesterday features the 100 Best Holidays in Australia. Plus, there is a free wall map that people love with the 100 on it and a bonus magazine – 16 Amazing Landscapes of Australia.  This is an excellent issue to promote with weeklies and or newspapers as well as with travel magazines. My recommendation is with weeklies since research shows women make more travel decisions than men.

Don’t early return this title – it sells through the on-sale period. This issue is getting good media coverage.

It’s one thing to say shop locally and another altogether to show customers the local connection of products you sell.

The photo shows how a Thomas Dux supermarket is promoting free range eggs. While not very local, the poster does show the eggs are from a farm in the state as well as giving confidence that they are genuinely free range.

We have products in our shops that could benefit from such promotion – including magazines from local publishers and gifts from local artists.

I like this poster because it is educational and that makes it feel more authentic – far more valuable than simply promoting that they have free range eggs.

Building shopper trust starts with sharing information they can believe. This poster achieves that for me.

The April issue of The Monthly is impressive in content and with its cover. Indeed, the cover is a stand out in the sea of colour in the magazine department. We have this issue in its usual location and with newspapers for the first week. We will also place it in our free standing floor unit as the entrance to the main magazine aisle as this will get it in front of more eyeballs – especially women who I think will be drawn to this issue.

The Monthly is a magazine we can guide customers to purchase on impulse by doing something outside the usual with it. What we do depends on the cover. This cover demands our attention.

With the cost of retail space increasing and magazine cover prices not keeping up with this and other costs of business, it’s only natural that newsagents look at operating costs. One cost we could do without is that of storing magazines with a greater than 30 day on-sale period. Once you consider the cost of storing a long shelf life title until their either sell or are returned it is often loss making.

Delayed billing does not address this issue. The only solution is replenishment drops through the on-sale based on sales.

While using newsagency businesses as warehouses works for the publisher, it no longer works for newsagents. The numbers have changed in recent years, our costs have risen far more significantly than margin dollars for some of these titles we are asked to warehouse. This is especially true those in shopping centres with higher occupancy costs and especially for titles where the cover price has not kept up with the CPI and increases in our operating costs.

We have been promoting The Block Fans + Faves here at the entrance to the magazine aisle, with weeklies and with home improvement titles. While sales are not what we need, we will keep these three locations at least until Thursday after which we will scale back to the location with weekly magazines.

I was surprised to see Yours and Woman’s Day bundled together in a discount pack last week. Yours is just a few issues old and should be enjoying a honeymoon period. Also, I thought it was targeting an older demographic than Woman’s Day. This discounting leaves me wondering if we should read anything into the move. For example, is Yours struggling and in need of support from the higher volume Woman’s Day? While we won’t know until the next audit, I can’t see any other reason for discounting a new title so soon after launch. If this is the case and Bauer wants to reach more prospective Yours readers they should engage newsagents and pay us to give sample copies away to people in the target demographic.