The James Bond Car Collection partwork series is not as popular as other recent releases. We are displaying it as prominently at the front of the shop in a high traffic area but it has not attracted the same sales.
Maybe it’s a bloke thing – males 35 an over appear to be the most interested. Maybe it’s the James Bond franchise itself.
Click here for a copy of the August Technology News for Newsagents published by my software company, Tower Systems. Tower now serves 1,435 Australian newsagents.
The launch of the new look Woman’s Day has gone well with sales up in the stores from which I have seen data. New Idea has had a good week too. The in-store promotional material for Woman’s Day, while good, did not tap into the new look enough to enable u to create compelling story around the change.
Also of interest this week is Woman’s Day and New Idea having a make up offer on the cover – it looked a bit me too. The offer was promoted on a small flyer attached to the cover – see the photo. The problem with these is that when placed back into the display unit after browsing – in any retail outlet – the flyer gets crunched and the next browser shows the apparently damaged magazine back and takes another which they crunch when they put it back in – you can see where I am going with this. Also, the offer, being on the lower left corner, is lost in traditional magazine racking.
This photo shows how we adjusted the display at the front of our newsagency today. We will leave it set this way until Monday when the cycle starts again. This week we broke with tradition decided on a broad offer rather than our usual single theme.
Of course, different demographics demand different approaches. In our centre we move to a more family focus over the weekend.
At Christchurch airport this morning:
While airport retail is a unique beast, I like how they broke a decent range up – made it look less like a sea of colour.
Publishers discussed occupational health and safety issues at the PANPA conference in Melbourne last week – especially during a presentation by Bruce Treharne of Rural press. This is timely given the newsagent funded study into the OH&S issues of overweight newspapers, a study which, as I understand it, publishers are yet to respond to.
Click here for a copy of the presentation by students of the Charles Sturt University to the PANPA (Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association) conference in Melbourne last week on The Newspaper of the Future. My core takeaway – free is the game in town if you want to reach Gen Y.
Publishers voted The Age Australian Newspaper of the Year last week in Melbourne. For businesses which value their mastheads highly in their accounts it surprises me that they have awarded a newspaper which regularly allows post it type ads to be stuck across the masthead.
ACP’s Netlink division seems to control partworks here in New Zealand. Check out the list of titles they handle here. Retail is very different since newsagencies as we know them in Australia don’t exist – hence the strong direct subscription pitch from ACP on their website.
I have been on the road in Christchurch (NZ) today and found this shop.
All they sell is magazines.
Excuse the front window as they have only just relocated. I’d guess that they have around 1,000 titles. The shop occupies around 90 square metres. They focus outside the major weeklies. Niche categories get a good play as do adult titles – which surprised me.
Opposite this magazine specialist is a convenience store with all the major weeklies on display at their front door.
In the first ten on-sale days of the 2006/07 Australia’s Open Gardens on sale period we sold 1 copy. This year, over the same period, we have sold 10 copies. Last year we located the title in the gardening section. This year, we located it next to the Australian Women’s Weekly. I did this because even though sales of AWW are flat, it attracts many browsers. Also, my view is that both titles appeal to the same demographic. Sales suggest that is true for my newsagency.
While we are bend some rules with what we display next to AWW and our women’s weeklies such as New Idea and Woman’s Day, the resulting sales make the effort worthwhile.
We plan to leave Australia’s Open Gardens next to AWW for another week. Our goal is to sell out!
Check out this story about Sony bendable screens – they are .3mm thick. It is this type of technology newspaper publishers including the New York Times are looking to for a reloadable electronic newspaper.
The impact of TV advertising is amazing and immediate. We have had The Secrets of the Stones partwork on display for three days and already customers are buying the title.
While not as popular as other partworks, that people visit our newsagency specifically looking for the title demonstrates the power of TV and the benefits of exclusivity for partworks.
For me, it is a reason to overlook the promotion of subscriptions in the partworks – my goal is to make the most out of this extra traffic generated by TV commercials for partworks such as The Secrets of the Stones. This is why we go hard at the front of the shop – to connect with the TVC and draw people in. It also provides an opportunity to show we are not a set and forget business.
458 newsagents now lodge returns electronically with magazine distributor Gordon and Gotch. 78% of those are Tower newsagents. In our experience having used EDI returns for more than two years, EDI returns are processed faster and with more accuracy than manually lodged returns – whether written on a form or entered into a distributor’s website.
Here is the same stand I posted about on Monday with a freshened display to reflect today’s magazines. I am posting this to show how the fixture evolves over the week. Note, no poster up for That’s Life since none arrived.
We weighed three budnles of magazines from NDD at my newsagency this morning: 20, 22 and 27kg. I have had a conversation today with Worksafe Victoria and they pointed me to the Occupational Health and Safety Regulations 2007 and advised that we (newsagents) could reasonably request that bundles be 15kg or less.
My plan is to take this up with NDD and request smaller bundles. The Worksafe office advised that they would be happy to investigate this further if NDD does not act on the request.
UPDATE: (16/9) NDD has taken action with the driver involved to address this issue.
Eleven newsagents contacted me following my post here about sales of The Bulletin with Maxine McKew on the cover. All bar two said sales were much stronger, most selling out. Unscientific and not all that meaningful I guess – but interesting to record.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Zoo Weekly might be in trouble for offering cosmetic surgery (breast enhancement) as a prize in a competition.
Maybe this competition is a tipping point. I suspect that the folks at Emap knew what they were doing – especially that the prize would be controversial.
My feeling – based on no hard evidence – is that Zoo has plateaued. There are only so many people wanting to buy magazines featuring former big breasted reality TV contestants. The formula is, well, a formula and without significant change becomes stale.
So, the contest is a success because the SMH and others are writing about the title. I’ll see what happens sales wise.
Sorry about the headline for this post, the temptation was too great.
Scott, commenting on my post about Jeff Webster’s Fitting Out for Bay & Coastal Fishing magazine included a link showing a “Jeff†selling copies of the magazine on eBay. It’s a fair shot to try and find customers for what is a niche title.
It made me wonder, however, how the publisher could better engage with newsagents. Being a niche publisher does present difficulties.
One option would be to get together with related titles which consumers could be expected to purchase with your title. Either create a double pack (which newsagents and consumers don’t like that much) or invest some money into point of purchase packaging to enable two or three titles to be displayed in a high traffic area. This is what the big publishers do with regularity to find new readers. Most newsagents receiving a display pack put it out as requested – the first step to compliance is providing the materials necessary to achieve this.
I bet that putting Bay and Coastal Fishing into a display unit with, three or four related titles would generate a good sales kick. By providing this material, Jeff Webster and other smaller publishers would make it easier for newsagents to drive sales – plus there would be the benefit of a consistent in store display message.
Newsagents in Western Australia make less from newspapers (home delivery and retail) that their Eastern Seaboard counterparts. Given the 7.7% increase in circulation revenue to $77.7 million and 16.3% increase in ad revenue (source:MediaWeek) newsagents have some financial support to counter any argument that the fair yet small increase they have sought for years is resolved. Last I heard – a few weeks ago – some newsagents were talking about taking serious action in pursuit of more equitable arrangements.
On the way to Sydney today, a few feet from security, the shutters come down and the Qantas terminal is evacuated. Thousands of people were herded out of the terminal while it was made secure.
People were well behaved. the only incident was the escalator spewing people to the upper level which was full of people – causing a momentary crush.
After waiting a while we logged on and booked a Virgin Blue flight.
Ah, the joys of travel.
Here is the artwork for the Father’s Day poster for our Sophie Randall Cards & Gifts shop. We have developed this in house and will display in-store in two sizes.
It reflects the subtly of the Sophie approach to retail, an approach we hope to bring to more outlets soon.
At the station on top of the honour box from which commuters purchase The Age was a flyer promoting home delivery. At 57 cents a day it’s a questionable move for the newsagent promoting the offer – unless he/she is converting retail customers from another newsagency to their delivery business. To move a regular customer from retail to home delivery in the same newsagency does not make sense.
I understand the importance of home delivery subscription to the publishers.
For newsagents, the economics are quite different: there is no revenue from advertising. Indeed, from a home delivery perspective newsagents have no control over pricing, little control over costs and no real opportunity for upsell. Indeed, through some newspaper publishers, newsagents moving customers from retail to home delivery give up GP for the privilege of home delivery – yet their cost base is higher.
Given the restructuring and consolidation currently play in the home delivery space I’d expect more newsagents to resist promotions such as The Age 57 cents a day offer.
The shopping centre in which my newsagency is located has been undergoing a welcome major refurbishment since March this year. Regulars here may recall my posts about the flooding in my newsagency and the debilitating construction noise which was turning customers away- our request for compensation is close to resolution.
the photo above is the view of the mall three doors down from the front of our shop. But it is worse than the photo shows – the gap between open businesses is extraordinary, making our end of the centre a ghost town for the last six weeks. Our whole end of the mall currently have 10% of available space occupied.
Sales across all departments are affected except for partworks – figure that!
The traffic has been bad for so long that magazine supplies will be cut soon – just as the hoardings come down and the new look retailers open.
I am not angry as these changes and we are not the first newsagent to encounter such challenges. They are part of life in a shopping centre. It is appropriate that the landlord blends tenants to achieve the best return.
Hopefully it will be business as usual soon.
Some magazine categories are a real challenge to locate and so get pushed from pillar to post. Gay related magazines fall into this category. They are often, unfairly, placed in the adult section. I had a customer ask today – because he could not find them in the adult section. When I showed him our small range he congratulated us by not putting them in the adult area. he has just moved from Sydney and has a story about a fight with his local newsagent when he asked that the gay magazines get moved from being mixed in with Picture, People and Zoo.
It amazes me what some people share when looking for they products they want.