Author: Mark Fletcher

Folio reports that magazines will be moved to the rear of the store in Wal-Mart stores under a new store layout plan.  magazines will continue to be sold at checkout lanes.

Supermarkets, department stores, convenience stores and petrol outlets exert more control over the placement of magazines here in Australia than newsagents.  Smart publishers will work with the newsagency channel and respect it for the opportunity it continues to provide.

We have placed the Michael Jackson commemorative issue of Life magazine on a stand in front of our newspapers.  we expect this intrusive yet simple display to work well for us with this one-shot title.  Jackson fans will not browse the newsagency looking for this title unless they have heard about it.  We are better off putting it under their noses to drive the impulse purchase.  This location with our newspaper stand is generating excellent success for us – most recently with Top Gear magazine.

This is another heavy week for magazine promotions.  Madison is the third ACP title we have in a feature location this week. We have it facing shoppers as they leave our two main magazine aisles.  This location is on the back of the ACP Basket Builder stand – space with many newsagents leave idle.  We will leave Madison in this location until next Monday – unless we shift it to our counter position.

Further to my earlier post about promoting the launch issue of Prevention magazine, we have the counter unit located in among our women’s weeklies titles.  This was another right out of the box display – very easy and fast to setup.  Publishers should take note of this – the easier they make it for newsagents to promote their titles the more likely they are to be promoted as they want.

We will try and keep this display unit for at least the next three months to help build regular Prevention customers for us.

So far today we have sold five copies of Prevention.

We are promoting Good Health magazine at the entrance to our women’s magazine aisle this week. This stand located at the entrance to the magazine aisle continues to work very well for us.  But with Good Health magazine out a week already I am not expecting amazing things from this promotion.  However, it would be good to be wrong on this.

We plan to change this display later this week if we are not getting the sales necessary.

The small stand promoting Top Gear magazine near newspapers over the weekend worked with three copies sold off the stand.

We track sales for single title stands.  The more successful a title in as a result of such a display the more likely we are to promote it in this way again.

Our placement of the latest issue of Rolling Stone at the counter resulted in sales of an additional six copies over the weekend.  Some of these are likely to be sales of the Rolling Stone which would not have otherwise been achieved.  This opportunistic placement of magazines is key to driving incremental sales.  Not flashy displays or consumer competitions but placement in a high traffic area where the cover will connect with a reasonable number of shoppers and from where a quick impulse purchase decision can be made.

It is challenging for publishers to make this pitch.  We do it in our newsagencies because to look at the covers and have space set aside for this type of promotion.  We have made it easy for us.