The privilege of Fortune magazine
I felt special to receive this Fortune Privilege Card – until I realised the card itself gave me nothing. It is a bit of froth to make me feel special enough to sign up for 68% off the cover price of purchasing Fortune at a newsagency.
The first publisher to engage commercially with newsagents and offer attractive deals for long term newsagent putaway commitment will realise the value of locking in loyal retail customers. While some will argue that the retail supply chain has a higher cost than the direct subscription model, I suspect that the cost is far lower than the 68% the publisher claims to give away with this Fortune offer.
Smart newsagents offer a professionally managed putaway service which includes SMS alerts to customers when their titles arrive, care for the titles so they are in mint condition when collected, barcode tracking of each customer’s copy when collected and up sell offers driven by the technology to help increase customer spend.
Newsagents are smarter and more capable in the magazine putaway area than these expensive and almost random mailings from publishers such as Fortune.
My message for publishers – work direct with me so, together, we can sell more magazines.
These are four of the hip hop / urban music titles we carry. At any point in time we have as many as eight. We usually receive one or two copies of each title. Sales are no more than one and often none. We request that titles are stopped and, eventually, they come back.
We were fortunate enough to take delivery of another five boxes of AFL Footy Cards late last week and we are almost out again. Had supply not restricted for the footy cards this year we could have easily sold three times what we have been supplied. While we understand that the nature of the cards requires that they are rationed, it is difficult to have to tell young kids that we are out of stock.
Newsagents are excited by the promotional opportunities of 
This is our first crack at strengthening our offering around our copying service. The copier is hidden behind the magazine displays. While not ideal, this is better than leaving the copier technology open with no up sell pitch around it. We are still working on the design of fixturing which would surround the copier make for a more professional presentation and display appropriate accompanying product.
We decided to give 
You know your marketing is working when a customers walk in clutching a flyer you have distributed and they ask for a specific item listed. You feel especially chuffed when the item they want is something you would not usually carry. This has happened several times during our Tax Time Savings promotion over the last month.
Every week now I am seeing evidence that blogging here about poor scale our by NDD is achieving a better outcome for my newsagency that dealing with them through regular communication channels. Titles such as this school selection book are being supplied in numbers which reflect the sell through rate of previous issues – as it should be.
Magazine distributors have criticised newsagents for years about lack of compliance. Now, the ball is on the other foot. Part of the compliance regime is that newsagents supply distributors with pre-sold data – listing the number of each title for which the newsagent has a firm order. The idea was that the distributors would use this to ensure that at least minimum orders are fulfilled – essential for partworks.