Author: Mark Fletcher

We didn’t receive Take 5 today.  After spending too long waiting on the phone to the distributor they suggested we would get replacement stock on Friday.  I explained this is no good because we sell 75% of our stock today.  After robustly making my case and waiting some more they said they would see what they could do.  They came through for us – Take 5 just arrived.  If only this could have been handled without all the time spent getting the matter escalated.  This is a retail business.  No stock = no sales.

The new Winter Favourites cookbook from ACP feels more like a magazine than a cookbook. It’s a departure from the other cookbooks in the succesful ACP line.

Given the look and feel of Winter Favourites we are promoting it as a magazine. The display in the photo is a couple of days old and is already generating good sales.

As I’ve said here recently, our goal is to sell through as much of a title as we can in the first few weeks – before having to pay for the stock.

Ben Tennyson, Ben 10, features on four magazine covers in-store right now: Kraze Club, K-Zone, D Mag and Disney Adventures.

Ben 10 is a character in a Cartoon Network TV show.  There is a Wikipedia page dedicated to the character and over 4 million website references and 600,000 blog post references.

While chasing down this information may seem obsessive to some, it helps us understand what we sell – we know more about the demographic, what they are interested in and that we can put four titles together in a feature display which might otherwise not happen.

Best of all is the Kids Birthday Parties blog which has ideas for Ben 10 themed birthday parties.  While Coles, Safeway and others may sell one or two of the magazines with Ben 10 on the cover, they will not go the extra step and have information about kids parties and the like.  This is where we can demonstrate our point of difference – leveraging product knowledge to add genuine value of shopping in a newsagency.

Reading some of the material online about Ben 10, it struck me that too often we focus on single titles because that is what publishers want.  Sometimes, a more holistic approach is better for our business.  This is the case with Ben 10 themed product in newsagencies this week.

I am grateful to Jane at Forest Hill for showing me the four covers and the opportunity we have.

I am grateful to have been given scanned sales data for newspapers and magazines in Woolworths supermarkets for the year to December 2007:

• Magazines $330,252,000, 2.2% growth on prior year.
• Newspapers $116,585,000, 7.6% growth on prior year.

For the December quarter:

• Magazines $83,400,000, or 3.2% growth on same quarter.
• Newspapers $29,100,000 pr 8.4% growth on same quarter.

This data could include new stores. They opened 19 in the second half of last year and have 774 supermarkets nationally.

Joystiq publishes a list of computer game magazines which have closed.  The report also records the decision last wee by Ziff Davis to shift Games for Windows: The Official Magazine from print to online only.

In the five months we have owned the newsagency in Frankston we have been experimenting with magazine displays in all sorts of places. We want to find the locations which work the best – outside of the traditional aisle end and other usual feature displays. Based on our experience elsewhere we expect to find two of three small locations of space from where we can really drive magazine impulse sales.

The photo shows our latest experiment above the waist height newspaper poster display at the front of the shop. This is not working for Burke’s Backyard so we will try another title next week before we we move onto another space.

We have found one new space which works well but we really need a second for the type of magazine promotions we like to run.