Author: Mark Fletcher

ACP Magazines has a fantastic prize on offer if you subscribe to any of six magazines in the lead up to Father’s Day at magshop. The choice of titles – Wheels, Money, The Bulletin, Wine, PC User and Inside Cricket – is excellent.

Research must indicate to ACP that this promotion will help boost sales, otherwise they would not invest in the promotion through online and print activity.

I wish I could offer the prize for the same commitment in my shop. With putaways so well managed from a technology perspective including the ability to handle a one year commitment and provide ACP transparency of this, the prize would be sure to boost my sales – plus regular putaway collection visit – and boost sales of ACP titles. The technology can even provide ACP with details of when the customer collected the putaway if the newsagent and ACP want to share such data.

Practical promotions such as this for Father’s Day would work in a newsagency. Newsagents would embrace it since it extends the Father’s Day offer beyond the traditional cards and candy offer – this is why we created our own Father’s Day pitch earlier this week.

Putaways are unique to newsagencies and loved by most of our customers. I’d like ACP to work with us to leverage putaways to their advantage. While newsagents can create their own offer, having a $64,000 car as a prize would help.

Working with newsagents on these promotions and not just online through magshop would certainly boost sales of ACP Magazines and deliver a great win win.

I received a message to call a mobile phone number earlier this week. No name, just a number. I returned the call and had a good a lively discussion with someone who started by asking why I am so critical of independent publishers.

It turns out that the caller was Ruth Cunningham, Publisher of Fisherman and Boatowner, the title I have blogged about here and here.

We had a good, robust discussion. I learnt more about their challenges and Ruth learnt more about ours. I appreciated the discussion. We each corrected misconceptions held by the other – that’s my take away at least. Ruth thought I hd told newsagents to take the title off the shelves – I did not.

I was not aware that small independent publishers are doing it tough as they are. They are as cash starved by some aspects of the magazine supply as newsagents. While newsagents pay for magazines on 30 day terms, publishers can wait up to 90 days from supply before being paid.

Newsagents cannot fix the cash-flow challenge for independent publishers. What we can do is know about independent Australian titles and more actively promote them. This is something marketing groups could do for members – newsXpress has done this several times already. Magazine distributors could also package promotions around related independent titles – to help newsagents better promote these titles in-store.

For their part, independent publishers could consider talking up newsagents in their publications. For example, guiding readers to visit their newsagent and ask for a putaway – to ensure supply would demonstrate practical support. The melbourne Observer newspaper does this with considerable success.

By finding ways to provide mutual support, small business newsagents and small business independent publishers could leverage each other for a brighter future. The key is that terms are commercial – both sides need to make a buck and neither should be a charity.

Maybe it is time for a public forum between newsagents and independent publishers – the common objectives and challenges of the two groups would make for some valuable dialogue.

I am grateful to Ruth for the conversation earlier this week. I hope we do it again.

The ACP Magazines Connections conference in Sydney today was a good event – the half day I was there fore at least. Ben (Manager newsXpress Forest Hill) and I left early to work on a forthcoming store opening. The morning session was good because we heard more about the changed filtering through Network Services – this is a business working hard to reinvent itself from the inside out. We also heard about the commitment of ACP Magazines to newsagencies. The data presented showed the strength of Connections newsagents compared to non Connections newsagents. The graph reminded me of the strong getting stronger and the weak … While there are strong newsagents not in Connections, judging by the numbers more prefer the discipline of the Connections offer.

What I like about Connections is that if we do nothing else but follow their weekly promotion calendar then we will grow our newsagency. The commitment from ACP helps pull focus newsagents might otherwise spend on other publishers.

The best sight of the day – the t-shirt worn by Jeanine Chatfield from First Inland City News, I love mags – great message plain and simple!

This is another magazine which arrived yesterday which concerns me. Tokion is a good title, I like it. Sales are up and down. Since we received only one copy it is hard to see if we can sell more. However, given some issued don;t sell, I am loath to ask for another copy or two. This is the conundrum of the magazine supply model. I’d like ti drive sales but then wonder about the cost to the business of carrying more copied of fringe titles like this one.

I know it sounds like I am having a bet each way on Tokion. Maybe I am. Fringe magazines, those where we receive one copy an issue, are a huge challenge for newsagents. I like the point of difference they offer yet I am not prepared to invest more cash – this is something distributors and publishers should do to grow their sales.

Life etc, the ABC badged magazine published by Universal magazines is another title which is consistently oversupplied. Given the excellent coverage provided on ABC TV, Radio and online to environmental issues, global warming in particular, I am surprised that the ABC would condone such waste. We consistently sell between twelve and fifteen copies a month out of twenty supplied. Yesterday we received twenty-five copies, a 25% kick in supply. Such a kick is not supported by the sales data.

I wonder how the ABC feels about such waste undertaken under its respected brand. There is nothing socially responsible about this behaviour.

Great to see bopo being promoted on the cover of Australian Women’s Weekly. With newsagents a key retail partner for bopo this marketing on the cover is relevant to us and most welcome.

bopo is interesting. While we don’t do much recharge business for this prepaid debit card yet, I know of some newsagencies where it generates considerable traffic. Being on the cover of AWW will make it more mainstream as will their connection with MTV announced a couple of weeks ago.

We are excited about this stand we have created to promote magazines as an ideal gift for Father’s Day.

We have put spare point of sale material for Father’s Day to good use to frame a the magazine offer and thereby visually connect it with our greeting card offer. We have placed this display on the dance floor between the counter, greeting cards and our main newspaper stand.

On the stand, we pitch magazines which we feel are appropriate as a gift for Dad. By covering fishing, sports and cars we’re hitting the categories of most interest. If we have more space we could have added health, cooking and some more sports titles.

Choosing the title mix was difficult. We will adjust the titles on display as new issues arrive. We are also tracking what sells off the stand and sales results will guide finessing the mix.

We created the stand because we felt it is important for newsagents to demonstrate that a traditional category such as magazines works with a season like Father’s Day. How many dad’s so you know who lust after, for example, Top Gear magazine but don’t buy it – what an ideal Father’s Day gift!

The stand also helps our team make gift giving suggestions to customers.

Following my theme last week of posting what we do at the front of our newsagency to promote magazines, here is the front comer of our counter yesterday. While not the ideal clean model, it works for us. Starting at the left is the busiest of our two lottery counters, next is the ACP Basket Builder stand – this is topped up daily, then we have the Herald Sun stand – the Herald Sun is also at our main newspaper stand, behind this are two titles which we rotate through the week, then is the Darrell Lea stand of impulse items and finally is a stack of VTAC Guides – this changes every week with another impulse opportunity in this place.

Once the redevelopment of the centre is complete and we know what our new lease line will be we plan to replace the front portion of our shop. This includes re-capping this part of the counter with a single professional unit which offers a more complete mix. For example, we will promote all weeklies and not just ACP product. The goal of the new unit will be to enable us to re-jig our message to people passing by our newsagency to reflect fresh product.

Sad to hear that Bark! magazine has closed. As I blogged two years ago it was an excellent title but lack of marketing resources meant it struggled to gain attention. Writing at OzPets, Melissa attributed the following quote to David Smith, MD of Bark! publisher:

Unfortunately, due to lack of advertising support, I have taken the decision to close bark!

Gourmet Traveller, Home Beautiful, In Style, New Woman, Madison … these are just some to the magazines this month with free gifts. The gifts range from bags to make up to restaurant guides. The challenge is to display the gifts in a way which drives sales – traditional magazine fixturing makes this difficult.

Over the weekend we promoted the Home Beautiful gift in a way which showed off the free Ultimate Shopping Guide gift and it worked well, achieving better than average sales.

On option we are considering, given the current crop of women’s titles with a gift, is to build a display around this.

I heard Friday that Nuts, the UK lads mag which outsells Zoo in the UK, is to launch here. My initial reaction was – do we really need another weekly lads mag – one which features reality TV contestants in naked and near naked shots?

Zoo is doing okay in Australia but I suspect it sells better outside newsagencies. But then, maybe another good title will being more focus on the category and help us drive traffic in that part of the shop and thereby help sales of other titles.

A report in The Independent in the UK Friday says lads mags suggests the bottom has fallen out of the lads mag market. Stroppybird has an interesting view on this here. Given the comments of some customers in newsagencies I’d say she is not alone – these magazines do nothing for equality. I would not buy them.

This is a new market for Australia compared to the UK. I was talking to a couple of newsagents yesterday at the GNS Market Fair in Sydney about this – they told me that Zoo is one of their best titles and growing. So, as you’d expect, in some demographics lads mags are strong and growing. The challenge for businesses like mine where interest is soft is to work harder at finding a market. One thing we need to do is to draw a distinction between FHM, Ralph and Zoo. The weekly is a different beast and needs to be promoted as such. And through all this, one has to navigate their feelings about the product itself. Ah, ethical dilemmas.

Photo from Nuts UK website.

Comic sales are falling in newsagencies. All but the high profile comic brand franchises are in trouble from what I can see. Our range (see photo) is a third of what it used to be. The range was cut over time because sales did not justify the stock investment. We are planning to feature comics at the counter to reinforce that we are in the space but, I am not confident about this. We are also considering moving the category in search of sales.

My sense is that the demographic most interested in comics is getting satisfaction from comic like material elsewhere: online, pay TV – both mediums have grown in coverage in Australia in the years over which comics have declined.

I have checked out a couple of specialty comic stores recently and they seem to be traveling okay so the hard core consumer seems to still be active – it is at the discretionary end where sales appear soft.