A blog on issues affecting Australia's newsagents, media and small business generally. More ...

Author: Mark

Promoting Coach magazine

mags-coach.JPGWe are promoting the latest issue of Coach magazine with this in-location display.  Coach is a new title from the Men’s Health team at Pacific Magazines.  The launch issue did well for us and we used exactly the same approach – an in-location display placed where guys interested in fitness and personal training will easily find the title.

We will also support the title with placement next to newspapers for a week early in the on-sale.

We have several gyms nearby and so we do get good traffic of guys interested in fitness as well as some personal trainers.

I like Coach magazine, it’s a well produced title filling a valuable niche need.

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magazines

Marketing Tip: How to Use Competitions to Drive Sales in Your Newsagency

Winners are grinners as they say. Shoppers who win from a retail store are happy and they tell their friends. Whether it is a large or small prize, the value to the business of making winners of customers can be considerable.

An active and co-ordinated approach to competitions is a vital part of newsagency marketing.

The best competitions are those where a customer of the newsagency is guaranteed to win. That is, there the competition is store specific. While participating in larger national and state wide competitions around products brands and even franchise brands can be good for business, it is the local competitions which provide the best opportunity for local promotion and local leverage.

Here are some tips on how to use competitions effectively to promote your newsagency:

  1. Every competition needs a focus. Promote a specific product or product category or a certain level of spending. Competitions open to anyone without a tactical focus are likely to be less successful.
  2. Make entering easy for everyone. Ensure that the mechanics of the competition – how to enter – are easy and understood. You don’t want to slow down the sales counter or have customers reject entering the competition because of complexity.
  3. Promote well. Promote the competition well in the business from the front window throughout the store.
  4. Encourage participation. Get all employees actively promoting the competition. Offer a reward for the employee who achieves the most entries per hour worked.
  5. Drive impulse purchases. A good competition is one used to drive impulse purchases at the counter. They key here is that the item being sold, the trigger for a competition entry, must be easily understood.
  6. Show off the prize. If possible, show the prize of offer for the competition. This can drive people to engage in the behaviour you are promoting as they more easily understand the opportunity.
  7. Show off entries. If entry in the competition requires shopper activity like drawing or coloring, show off the entries as this will drive more traffic to the store.
  8. Promote winners. Take photos of competition winners, with their permission, and use these in newsletters and on a winners board in-store. This is how you can promote the store as a place where winners shop.
  9. Host and event around the prize draw. Make the drawing of the winner a special event with its own retail hooks to drive sales.
  10. Create a competition calendar. This can provide focus to the competition program throughout the year and ensure that they are a consistent part of the marketing mix.
  11. Engage with suppliers. Call of key suppliers to support the business with prizes for your competitions. This is more easily achieved if the competition connects with specific brands.
  12. Promote externally. Use the competition to promote the business externals in advertising and promotional flyers.

Competitions, regardless of size, can drive excellent results for a newsagency. Professional execution is the key from the planning stand right through to the drawing of the winner. Ensure that everyone involved including customers have fun with each competition you run.

When you find something which works, be sure to share it here.

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marketing

Promoting Your Garden magazine

mags-yourgarden.JPGWe are promoting the Spring issue of Your Garden magazine with prime placement in the garden section.  It’s responding with sales – selling half our allocation already. Since this is not a monthly title we need to remind shoppers that Your Garden is available – hence the high visibility placement next to popular monthly titles.

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magazines

Leveraging Father’s Day

fathers-gift.JPGWe took a range of steps last last week to leverage the Father’s Day opportunity to the max.  The result has been an excellent year on year boost in sales.  Cards alone are up 30%.  Gifts are up.  magazines are up beyond our natural growth too.  While we have run the season for six weeks, here is what we did specifically in the last few days:

  • Placed Top Gear with newspapers – as a reminder that this is a great gift for Dad.
  • Placed a selection of Dad magazines with our weekly impulse display unit – again as a reminder that these are great gift ideas for Dad.
  • Reminded all our shoppers of the Sony DVD Home Theatre System one of our customers will win for buying a Hallmark Father’s Day card
  • Made the front of the store, facing into the mall, our Father’s Day zone – every shopper had to go through this.

The result is a terrific boost in sales of Father’s Day cards, gifts and magazines.  Indeed I saw plenty of magazines purchased yesterday for Father’s Day – customers were happy to share that information.

Maybe publishers could work with retailers on this rather than chasing subscriptions online for Father’s Day.  My sense is that we going boost Father’s Day magazine sales considerably with a united and well co-ordinated campaign.

The knock-on benefit of being a destination for Father’s Day is the other sales we get from the increased traffic.  Just wonderful!

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Gifts

Watching supermarket competition

I noticed the announcement this week that Aldi is to open longer hours and release special deals twice a week in an effort to combat the work done by Coles and Woolworths over the last year which has seen them encroach on the Aldi end of the supermarket space.

As the these three and other supermarket chains battle it out to own supermarket shopping in Australia, we can learn something from their fights.  For example, the decision by Aldo to release specials twice a week is interesting to me on a couple of fronts:

  1. Most newsagents don’t offer regular, weekly, specials which are marketed as such.
  2. Any who do probably have not changed their approach in years.

Specials are not about deep discounting for the sake of it.  In the supermarket model, specials are used to reinforce the overall value proposition of the supermarket to the consumer.  They lure shoppers who then purchase other items at regular price.  Specials almost always are funded by suppliers in a way which protects the supermarket margin.

But the approach to specials has changed in the last year with the down down and other campaigns.

The challenge to this non expert in the area is that through the focus over the last year on lower price, they have educated shoppers about price, that price is the most important point.  On products on which we compete, this presents us with a challenge.

Given that price is the easiest point of difference for a competitor to respond on, I would have thought that supermarkets would have been better of pursuing points of difference in other areas where competition is harder. I think this is why we need to focus on non-price competition points in our businesses, especially around products where we compete with supermarkets.

Blue Ocean Strategy is an excellent book to read about how businesses should differentiate.  I read it a few years ago and consider it to be one of the best business books I have read.  It talks down price as a point of competition and urges focus on competing in other, exclusive, ways.

With plenty of what we sell being also available from supermarkets, how do we position out businesses against their aggressive campaigns and this latest battle now joined by Aldi?  Do we try?  While many newsagents leave supermarkets to play their games, not seeing them as our competitors, we need to ensure we are aware as our retail channel is of tremendous interest to them.  We take close to one billion dollars in revenue which they would like to get through their registers.

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Newsagency management

Newspaper Father’s Day gift

fday-oz.JPGI was interested to see The Australian newspaper advertising subscription offers as a Father’s Day gift … and not an iPad promotion in sight.  Nice. The only enhancement I;d like to see as a retailer is a promotion which respects the retail channel and allows us to promote The Australian this way. Maybe a pay for ten copies and get 14 for free over three weeks – this could fit more budgets for Father’s Day.

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newspaper home delivery

Excellent numbers so far for Father’s Day 2011

fathers-cards-gifts.JPGOur Father’s Day card sales are up 41% up year on year to the close of trade Thursday night and we still have two full days of trade to go not including the day itself.  We are having a terrific season.  Not just with Hallmark Father’s Day cards but also with gifts.  The Cadbury tool boxes (full of Cadbury’s chocolates) are working a treat.  It is so much easier to sell well known brands, especially brands which are advertised on TV and elsewhere.  Value based brands are especially useful since the purchase of these products is less about price.

In addition to cards being up this year, so are gifts.  And with the excellent margin for gifts we are very happy with the wonderful kick Father’s Day delivers to our gross margin, taking us way above the average for a newsagency.

We are very happy with Father’s Day 2011.  This used to be a flat and even dying season.  Not now.

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Gifts

Publishers in love with deals websites

table-magazine.jpgI have been doing some digging into the use of deals websites like Groupon and livingsocial by publishers here in Australia and elsewhere.  It seems that more publishers are using these sites to drive sales spikes.  The deals are usually better than those advertised in the magazines themselves and dramatically different to the over the counter single copy price.  The pricing model is so different that I worry for the damage they are causing to their brand from such steep discounts.

Take the deal in Pittsburgh for Table magazine.  $10 for a one year subscription.  Click on the image to see the details.  This 66% discount is extraordinary.  It would anger me as a retailer who is asked by the publisher to raise the awareness of their product.  Often it is the work of retailers in promoting a masthead that enables the masthead to undercut retail prices to chase a direct to consumer sales relationship.

Publishers ought to be careful in stepping up to using Groupon and similar sites.  Their actions with extraordinary discounts could be the straw which gets newsagents so offside that we penalise participating titles as a result.

Our channel is valuable.  More magazine publishers ought to respect that.

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magazine distribution

Caravan & Motorhome magazine chases subscriptions

On the back of an excellent audit result, showing 24.62% increase in sales – ranking it third in sales growth behind Gameinformer and Men’s Fitness, the publisher of Caravan & Motorhome is out chasing subscription business with this post on a forum.

Dear Forum Members,

We’ve got some fantastic news and a great offer for all!

I posted a little while ago that Caravan & Motorhome magazine experienced the third largest growth in copy sales of any magazine in Australia for January to June 2011 – growing by 24.6% from the previous year. ABC audit Jan-June 2011

To celebrate this momentous result, we would like to offer you three upcoming issues of Caravan & Motorhome magazine and DVD for FREE, like a FREE 3 issue subscription.

For our current subscribers, as a way to say thank you for your loyalty to the magazine, this offer will extend your current subscription by 3 issues.

To those who are not subscribers, we would love you to sample the convenience of subscribing by sending you the next 3 issues for free!

There is no obligation to buy anything else!

So hurry, Offer expires September 30, 2011.

To get your 3 free copies of the magazine simply call and ask us to send you your FREE magazines and DVDs.

FREECALL 1800 801 647 QUOTE THIS CODE: FM450

While I understand that publishers need to grow subscriptions in their circulation mix, I wish some would more deeply engage with the newsagency channel to drive over the counter sales.  Our retail channel is the most important outlet for attracting new readers.

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Magazine subscriptions

frankie flying off the shelves

The latest issue of frankie is flying off the shelves.  So much so that we have ordered more stock.  We think that this issue could end up 33% on our recent sales.  Our display is working a treat.

Check to see if your sales are good.  if so, make sure you order stock so you don’t sell out.  Gotch has stock.

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magazines

Promoting the latest Better Basics

mags-betteerbasics-sep2011.JPGWe are actively promoting the latest issue of Better Basics magazine from Pacific Magazines.

Trading off the Better Homes & Gardens brand and supported by the personality and passion for food of Fast Ed, this food title is finding good sales for me.  It’s accessible and this is important with food titles in this specific part of the food magazine marketplace.

We are supporting Better Basics with this aisle-end display facing toward the entrance to the newsagency as well as placement with food titles.  We will give the magazine a run in between our two major daily newspapers over the weekend as it works very well in this location.

This is a title we will support through the on sale as we see sales beyond the first couple of weeks.  It’s important to notice these opportunities as it is easy to treat this like the bulk of magazines which see sales clump up early in the on-sale.

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magazines

Promoting Ita and The Australian Women’s Weekly

mags-awwsep2011.JPGWe are promoting the latest issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly with this main counter display.  We also have the new issue on our impulse unit facing into the mall as well as with our weeklies on the dance floor and in the usual location for the title.

The Ita Buttrose cover is a test as it is a connection with the old AWW yet the story itself is a connection with the new newsier AWW. It will be interesting to see how this issue goes.

We are running with various placements in store as each attracts its own shoppers.  We want to make sure that we give the title as much support as possible to find the maximum sales.

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magazines

James Bond cars again?

mags-jamesbond.JPGI am surprised at the re launch of the James Bond car Collection.   It makes me feel like we are in a time warp with this re issue and the recent re issue of The Art of Knitting.  It does feel like a bit of a cash grab.

Oh well, we are participating by placing part 1 in a good location.  It will need to generate good sales by Monday as that is when we will relegate it because of other pressing demands on this premium space as we start to fill for Christmas.

In this retail climate more than ever magazine distributors have an obligation to allocate with care.

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magazines

News Magazines cuts deals for Vogue and Vogue Living

voguedeal.jpgIt seems that News Magazines likes livingsocial for selling its magazines – hot on the heals of their promotion of MasterChef magazine is $39 a year deals for Vogue and Vogue Living.

Is this hot pursuit of subscription deals by News Magazines related to other events, such as the closure of Borders?

Do subscriptions signed up for through livingsocial count as sales, even if the coupons which are purchased are not fulfilled?

While I understand that subscriptions play a role in the magazine supply model, I am frustrated to see deals like this being promoted so widely without any deal being put to newsagents to enable us to be competitive. We work hard at building brand awareness and it is this work which, in part at least, enables publishers to promote subscription deals.

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magazines

Stationery sales up 35%

Our stationery sales were up 35% in August compared to the figures for 2010. We are thrilled with this result as it vindicates greater attention to the category in our buying and customer service. Pens, everyday and fine writing, journals and paper are the key drivers of the growth. Stationery growth is also helped by our 61% increase in ink sales. This department (and it is a department for us separated from Stationery) continues to power forward.

While there are many people reporting doom and gloom for retail at present, we are loving the opportunities of this marketplace … by constantly changing our range. Embracing change is helping us have a good time and enjoy sales.

Newsagents who do the same thing over and over with stationery will most likely get the same (or worse) results.

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Newsagency opportunities

Flashing badges a great counter line

flashingbadges.JPGThese simple flashing badges have been selling like hot cakes at one of my newsagencies. We’ve had them for a month now and I am surprised at how well they have gone in such a short time. It is terrific seeing a shopper add a badge to a greeting card purchase.

The $6.99 addition to the basket not only drives margin dollars from the sale, it also drives the overall average GP achieved by the business.

With so much of what we sell having a margin of 25% or less, it is important to drive sales of items which are above (well above) this.

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Opportunistic retail

Promoting delicious magazine

mags-delicious-oct11.JPGWe are promoting the latest issue of delicious magazine with a prime seat placement in with our food titles.  We also have a pocket located with our food title co-location display in the impulse area of our store – from where we sell more than 25% of our food titles.  delicious is under the pump with the launch of Feast and the increased activity from other food related titles in newsagencies.  These challenges aside, the cover shot of the current issue looks, well, delicious.

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magazines

Newsagency marketing on TV

newsXpress is the only newsagency marketing group with a full year TV advertising commitment.  The national TV ads started last month.  Ads are changed monthly, reflecting seasonal opportunities, special deals and other newsXpress specific opportunities.  They are as much about brand awareness as they are a call to action.

Here is the latest newsXpress TVC.

While I am a newsXpress Director and therefore conflicted, that newsXpress newsagencies are being promoted relentlessly and nationally on TV, 4,200+ spots over the next year, is good for newsXpress, its suppliers and the broader newsagency channel.

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newsagency marketing

Express Publications seeks to appease newsagents

Responding to newsagent concerns about magazine related cash flow, Express Publications yesterday announced to the newsagency channel that from September 7, 2011 their titles will have four weeks on-sale and be distributed in the first half of the month where possible.

This is a significant move by Express, one I am sure newsagents will welcome.  I am pleased they have made the move but am frustrated that it has taken so long.

The other issues for Express Publications to address are the cost to newsagents of returning unsold copies of magazines and the bagging of magazines.  These two issues are connected since bagged magazines are heavier and this increases the freight costs newsagents bear in returning unsold stock.

Publishers who want a healthy and engaged newsagency channel will address these issues.  We only make money from sales.  Everything else is an overhead – hence our desire to rein them in.

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magazine distribution

Herald Sun newspaper covers front page news headline

sunsep30.JPGJust like the Courier Mail, the Herald Sun has an ad stuck on the front page, covering part of the main news story of the day.

This ad placement, covering news, shows how News Limited treats news when there is a buck to be made from advertising.

Some customers were angry yesterday, directing it at Woolworths – I guess because it is so easy to be angry at rich supermarkets … they are a bit like banks like that.

While the Herald Sun placement is not as insensitive as the placement by the Courier Mail, it is bad enough, covering the main headline of the day.

For many years News Limited was (maybe is in some places) aggressive toward newsagents about placement of their newspapers, saying that the front page was vital to driving sales.  Now that they appear happy to compromise their lead news story of the day I guess their opinion about what drives sales has changed.

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Newsagency challenges

The obligatory street directory promotion for Father’s Day

fathers-melways.JPGWhile satellite navigation devices are ubiquitous, there is still a marketplace for street directories, especially at this time of the year as Father’s Day gifts. The team at one of my stores has put together this excellent display promoting the Melways Street Directory.

While sales of printed street directories are not what they were a few years ago, they do warrant promotion – there is a noticeable sales lift as a result of the attention we give the product. Also, there appears to be fewer retailers stocking street directories now so the competition on price is less.

We are not promoting any special deals, just promoting the product to leverage seasonal interest around Father’s Day.

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Gifts

Promoting 30 Days of Fashion

mags-30days.JPGWe are promoting the 30 Days of Fashion campaign by ACP Magazines with this high profile aisle-end display facing out into the shopping mall.

I like the display as it promotes the overall campaign while also giving appropriate attention t the titles we want to sell under the banner of the overall event.

We have a number of promotions planned to support the 30 days event beyond this display.

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magazines

Art of Knitting not so good

mags-artknit.JPGThe second time around for Art of Knitting part series does not appear to be going as well as expected if the sales data I have seen plays out for the newsagency channel. Our sales have been nowhere near what we expected and not a patch on the sales we achieved when this partwork first hit Australian shores.

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magazines

Courier Mail newspaper covers Daniel Morcombe front page story

coriermail-shame.jpgInsensitive.  Appalling.  Disgraceful.  Greedy.  Shocking.  These are just some of the words one could use to describe the ad for Woolworths stuck over a page one story about Daniel Morcombe in today’s Courier Mail newspaper.

What does it say about News Limited that it would rather take the money of a giant supermarket chain than give this heartbreaking story respectful coverage.   Oh, there will be excuses and explanations.  The fact of the ad stuck over the story is there for all to see.

News Limited ought to be ashamed of selling out to Woolworths and covering up this story.  The company should apologise.

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Ethics