I am aware (through the developer) of a new newsagency opportunity in an outer eastern suburb in Melbourne. The new centre, due to open late this year, will have Aldi, Dan Murphy, Chemmart and Nandos in addition to the planned 300 sq metre newsagency. There is plenty of free parking right in front.
If this is of interest to you, please make contact with me.
The Melbourne Gift Fairs come to an end today. While there has not been as much in the way of new product that we wanted to see, some excellent deals have been on offer. Plenty of suppliers were prepared to negotiate on terms, making taking on new ranges more appealing from a cash-flow perspective. Suppliers who are sensitive to the cash-flow challenges of retail today are more interesting to newsagents keen to expand their floor stock – especially in the lead up to Christmas.
One frustration is a few suppliers who refused to permit their products to be places in newsagencies. While this is their right, it demonstrates an ignorance of what a newsagency can look like today.
Gift fairs always present excellent margin and range opportunities – crucial opportunities in building a healthier newsagency, crucial opportunities in pursuing change.
From Mag World, a Canadian publication on magazine retailing:
According to Shepard, a primary magazine pocket at a Gateway newsstand in the TTC has a list rate of $11,500 per year. The company’s most expensive location is Toronto’s Union Station, which sells primary pockets at annual rates anywhere from $12,000 to $30,000.
Read the article from which I lifted this quote here.
While I understand there is a considerable difference magazine retailing in Australia compared to Canada and a difference in transit retailing to high street and shopping centres, the numbers quoted make you think about the value of our retail locations.
Independent Digital Media, a division of IPMG, the owner of the NDD magazine distribution business, is set to launch TheKnot, an online wedding ‘magazine’ in October this year.
This move challenges the capital intensive print wedding magazines (some of which NDD distributes) with a more timely, more easily searched and lower cost to distribute product. The Australian has more on this story. Also, check out the US website on which the local version is based.
Expect more announcements like this, especially in directory like categories, as weddings is.
This is a smart move by the IPMG business and while they will probably say that it will not impact print wedding magazines, it will if successful. It is also a move from which we can learn. Some magazine categories will disappear. IPMG is building a future planning for that, forcing change even. If newsagents act as usual when faced with major changes, we will complain about the IPMG move and expect someone else to develop our future for us.
As I said, I think this is a smart move. Kudos to IPMG for making the move. We need to take notice.
Sometimes you have to break the magazine display rules to drive sales. They do this really well in our Frankston newsagency by placing fashion titles targeting a young reader with teen magazines. These titles work better in this location than in the women’s magazines aisle – how often do you see a teen or ealry twentysomething girl look in the fashion segment for magazines?
What our Frankston team does is a good example of the value of breaking rules sometimes.
Plastic Logic plans to launch what they claim is the world’s first flexible screen e-reader early next year. Click here to see a demonstration of the unit. Forbes overnight published a story touting the new Plastic Logic unit as bringing electronic newspapers a step closer.
2010 is shaping up as the year of e-readers with several companies close to launching new products in this space for books, magazines and newspapers.
Robert Pattinson is hot right now if magazine editors are any judge. He is on the cover of current issues of Famous, Who and NW. We are trying to tap into this apparent interest by placing Famous next to our main newspaper stand as well as having stock in its usual location. Who has just about sold out over the weekend and NW is already co-located in the ACP basket builder stand.
It is important we notice these trends as we can use them to sell more magazines.
We selected Cosmopolitan for our prime counter display today because of the free Impulse scent with the magazine. We only received one poster so we had to improvise. The Just In bookmark has been included to try and draw more attention to the display.
I like how the Impulse offer with Cosmopolitan is attached to the magazine – at the lower left corner. This makes displaying the title easier and does not take up the space you often find with gifts.
We are promoting the latest issue of Top Gear magazine (out today) and the fridge magnets giveaway on the back of the ACP basket builder stand which faces customers as they exit our men’s magazine aisle. This location has been developed from a filler promotional space to premium space over the last eight months. Hopefully it will drive excellent results for Top Gear.
Most magazine publishers prefer their titles to be displayed on the flat stack- the flat shelf at the base of the magazine display. It is the only place, in traditional magazine fixturing, where the whole front cover is on display. Publishers prefer this because they think this is where customers look. Newsagents regularly receive bulletins from publishers and magazine distributors asking for this location.
Some publishers even go as far as asking merchandisers to move their magazines to the flat when in-store. This creates tension in some retail situations – it is the retailer’s shop after-all. (Merchandisers should not move stock without permission from the newsagent.)
My observations are that the majority of customers navigate to an area of a shop by what they see at or close to eye-level. Once they are in the area they want, around 70% browse by what is in the fixture and 30% browse by the flat stack.
While this will vary from newsagency to newsagency, I think it is a mistake for p[ublishers to primarily focus on the flat stack when guiding newsagents as to product placement.
Hallmark has launched Hallmark Mobile Greetings in the US, for sending more creative greetings using mobile phones than a text message. The initial launch includes a small network of phone models in the US. The company plans to make it available on the majority of mobile phone models and to permit messages to be sent from most major mobile phone networks to any other network. each greeting is charges at US$.99cents.
Click here for a copy of the first of a series of newsletters from Network Services about their implementation of the new XchangeIT Link platform for newsagents.
‘This is a Fantastic Time to start a newspaper’ published by Gerson Lehrman Group is well worth reading. Written from a US marketplace perspective, it argues that now is an excellent time to launch a newspaper. The artline lists several reasons for this. The last reason is the one which interests me the most: Technology and innovation will change the business model.
We don’t see this in Australia yet, but it will come. Our challenge is to be ahead of this wave by have alternative traffic generators in our businesses, shop firts which serve us and not one or two suppliers and an overall business model which leverages our position through the change with existing important suppliers like newspaper publishers.
The article is another call to action for it, not just about newspapers but about the newsagency model more broadly.
We start by cutting out inefficiencies in our businesses. This means stopping some decades-old practices. If a product or service is not profitable. Stop. No contract can force you to lose money.
We need to look ahead, over the horizon and not back at old practices.
We will make our own luck through this transition.
Our July numbers are show a healthy month, overall. The sales numbers, compared to July last year are: Art – up 14%; cards – up 9%, Gifts – up 200%, magazines – down 5%, Newspapers – up 6%, Ink – up 25%, Stationery – line ball.
There is good news inside the magazine department: food – up 7% (unit sales), men’s lifestyle – up 26%, music – up 15% (Michael Jackson), special interest – up 8%. Women’s weeklies are down but our sales of these are choppy month to month.
Given the interest in my post last week about the chook on the cover of Burke’s Backyard magazine (Don featured chooks in his TV segment on ACA on Friday night BTW) I thought I’d write about Australasian Poultry. This magazine is a good example of the special interest titles we sell in newsagencies. These titles are important to us – they are our point of difference in the magazine department, they drive habitual sales and they are a growing category. I know from postcode data that customers are prepared to travel further to purchase special interest magazines. I know from basket data that special interest magazine customers are more likely to purchase more magazines. There are two compelling reasons for us to embrace the special interest segment. This is why I am expanding selected categories.
The TV campaign for the Ben 10 partwork must have started based on the traffic beating a path to our doors yesterday. We’re at a 75% sell-through already and it is less than a week. We are capitalising on the opportunity by placing the product, for the weekend, at the front of the shop – to draw kids in with mum or dad in tow. Some of these kids also pick a pack or two of AFL footy cards while mum or dad purchase something too. This is how to make money from the early issues of these traffic generating partworks.
Newsagents in Victoria should take time out of their businesses and visit the GHA and Reed Gift Fairs in Melbourne starting today and running through to Wednesday. You will see product allied to what is sold in newsagencies today as well as many completely new lines and categories. I was talking with the GHA (Gift and Homewares Association) yesterday and they confirmed that the number of newsagents attending these fairs increases each year.
Gifts are a fast-growing category for newsagents. I have seen newsagencies go from $10,000 in sales from gifts in 07/08 to $40,000 in 08/09. The margin, depending on your buying and pricing policy, is usually around 50%. The key to success is careful buying and knowing your customer – oh, and that you may not be your customer.
It is also important to have a price management policy – knowing how long you want to hold an item and how you transition the item through price points to move the stock.
I know a bit about the fairs because my software company, Tower Systems, exhibits. This year, like last, we are at the Showgrounds location. We find it worthwhile because of the number of newsagents attending and because of our growing gift shop customer base.
We are pre-selling the Official Michael Jackson 2010 calendar. Customers are reacting well, we have good orders in ttwo of our stores. There is no resistance to the requirement for a chunky deposit or the terms associated with the offer.
This is a great way to lock-in business in advance of a hot product being launched, before others flood the market with Michael Jackson themed calendars. Right now, this offer is exclusive to us.
The idea of the pre-sell is a newsXpress initiative.
We are playing with selling pre-wrapped gifts, to make our offer more appealing to time poor customers. The wrapped boxes of the photo tree (see photo) looks more appealing in its wrapped form than the tree standing alone. We have a numbers of gifts pre-wrapped in this way and will expand if customer support is strong. This is in addition to our work with gift hampers.
Newsagents concerned about newsagencies being used to harvest new print magazine subscriptions should read an article published yesterday by BtoB which reports that US magazine subscriptions originating from the Internet are predicted to grow 22% according to a survey of publishers.
Print magazine subscriptions originating from the Internet are anticipated to represent 22% of new business sales among Magazine Publishers of America members, according to an online study the association issued earlier this week.
Publishers in Australia continue to ignore an opportunity to work with newsagents on a more structured approach to subscriptions.
We are enjoying success with food magazines so we decided to leverage this with a display at the front of our newsagency, where people entry to purchase lottery tickets. We have have included a selection of titles from the Better Basics (which is almost sold out) to the monthlies and a selection of ACP Cookbook titles.
We will leave this display up for the weekend and assess its value to us on Monday. We like to change this display at the front of the newsagency regularly as it is a window on the business. We choose the categories to promote based on sales movement we see.
The VTAC Guide went on sale in our newsagency this morning – an in newsagencies across Victoria. We have a display next to our main newspaper stand – it will remain here for a couple of weeks. We are opportunistically chasing impulse business in addition to destination business for this title – hence the prime location placement.
The cover of the VTAC Guide has excellent visual cut through, better than recent years. This is another reason for prime-location placement. We are expecting good sales.
In the rush of the Powerball jackpot yesterday I noticed a customer working through each copy of That’s Life we had on display, looking for copies which had cash – as part of the weeks giveaway with the magazine this week. My initial thought was to go and ask her to stop. However, I decided to not approach her until it became a problem for other customers. She was not damaging the titles and was careful about putting them back neatly. Also, I did not know her financial situation. I reasoned that if I stopped her I’d need to take action on the many browsers we see each week reading magazines. I don’t want to be that newsagent who barks at browsers. I like people reading magazines and enjoying our retail space while they do it.
Thinking about it now, I’d like to know her story. It’s a brazen and potentially embarrassing thing to do – to hold the money wallet to the light looking for a note.
It is amazing what you see in a newsagency some days.
I know I go on here about bagged magazines (they are not browser friendly and waste newsagent space), especially the junk from Express Publications. Yesterday, one customer bought three packs of bagged Express Publications magazines. I asked her why. They were for a gift and they knew the person liked crafts. The purchaser was not into crafts – she said she had no idea what magazine was good or not so she went for volume. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that one magazine was current the other two were ranging from old to ancient.
Last week, Barnes & Noble (reportedly the world’s largest bookseller) launched its digital book strategy. This week, the bookseller launched free Wi-Fi in its stores. These are significant moves by the bookseller – primarily against online store Amazon and their Kindle readers.
This latest move shows how serious Barnes & Noble are in pursuing the sale of digital editions of books.
Barnes & Noble, like all of us bricks and mortar businesses face the challenge of remaining relevant against online businesses. Devices like the Kindle in the US and iPhone are changing how people access and consume content which they previously accessed in a printed form.