Author: Mark Fletcher

Another title came out from the folks at Puzzle People yesterday.  We received a chunk of stock for which we had no spare space on our shelves.  To make room, we returned another of their titles a few weeks early.  Newsagents don’t have the cash or the shelf space to be the warehouses for publishers and distributors.  This is one of the reasons why titles are returned early. Publishers have control over timing and supply quantities – two key factors in early return consideration.

While we will miss one or two sales of Codebreak from Puzzle People, taking it (or another title) off early was the only option.

We have moved Men’s Health from the power end display to next to the newspaper stand – it has worked well in this location previously.  We’ll leave it here next top newspapers for a week.

We are developing a small list of titles which work well in this tiny location – I expect the mix would vary considerably by newsagency. While major weeklies and monthlies would probably work here, we don’t try them since they get good coverage elsewhere in-store already.

The new look NW magazine has good visual cut-through on retail shelves.  It stands out from the other weeklies.  It has a bit of a UK weekly feel to the cover.  I think the redesign will see NW picked up by more people and that has to lead to more sales.  The renewed competition we are seeing at the moment in the weeklies space is good – they just need to remember that newsagents can be victims of their games.

It was a challenge yesterday reconfiguring the fashion space to fit Bazaar and the bagged Bazaar bumper fashion package onto our shelves.  We made it by cutting space allocated to other titles back.  We have found the best way to drive sales of premium packages like the bagged Bazaar issue is to open them out – this shows off the value of the package.  This is what created the main space challenge for us.  Hopefully, the sales will be the reward for the space allocation.

We are promoting the latest issue of Prevention magazine next to the Australian Women’s Weekly as well as it’s usual home in the women’s health and fitness area and next to our main newspaper stand.  We have found that Prevention responds well to co-location and next to AWW is ideal.  We will leave it in this location for a week.

Our approch with co-location is to try and use the strength of a title or other product to drive the impulse purchase of another product.  It works well enough for us to keep investing time and space in this.

We are promoting Woman’s Day at the counter for the next two days. The free mini cookbook with the magazine earns this premium position. Magazines with free cookbooks on the cover have been appealing for us in the past. We can’t afford to allocate this space for more than two days – but that’s okay since we will achieve more than 75% of Woman’s Day sales in the first two days.

We chose this practical display option over a billboard display as it is likely to drive a better outcome for us – although publishers do tend to prefer the billboard displays.