Bauer yesterday launched a three month long promotion exclusively in Woolworths supermarkets across Australia. The stand in the photo is the in-store offer:

BUY ONE GET ONE ½ PRICE.

The Bauer titles involved are: Woman’s Day, NW, Take 5, OK!, Yours, Australian House and Garden, Australian Women’s Weekly, Cosmopolitan and Homes+.

A supermarket person I spoke with yesterday said they expect Bauer would be paying Woolworths for the space for the floor unit in each store for the three months and compensating for the cover price discount.

I get that publishers need to pitch different offers in different channels from time to time. Most of these promotions run for a week, two weeks or maybe the on-sale period of a monthly.

This three month long campaign by Bauer and Woolworths is too long. It has serious potential to divert purchases from local newsagencies to Woolworths. Is this what Bauer wants? Their actions suggest it is.

The newsagency channel people at Bauer, people who probably had nothing to do with the Woolworths decision, would remind us of the money the company spends on our channel – merchandisers, the Connections program, a business building program and reader rewards. None of these investments has tangible value for newsagents in my opinion. I would rather the company make a more direct and practical investment in our channel.

Newsagents account for 50% of magazine sales. This makes us the largest single channel of magazine sales in the country. The investment in our channel should reflect this and it should consist of offers and marketing that shows us as the dominant magazine channel.

The thirteen month long promotion in Woolworths is a mistake by Bauer in my opinion, inexcusable. It is an attack on small business retailers, the very retailers Bauer executives claim are important to the company.

I was at the Bauer Connections conference in Brisbane a few months ago and listened to the usual round of praise for newsagents and statements of how important the channel is to Bauer. The thing is, these statements are hollow when confronted with the Woolworths promotion.

This three month long promotion by Bauer exclusively in Woolworths has come at a time when the company is flexing its muscles with some newsagents. They are demanding magazines be located in prime space and that Bauer titles be given 50% of space. This is truly ridiculous. If they push that with me I will quit their titles as Bauer titles taking 50% of magazines space and magazines being in prime location in-store would not pay for the retail space.

The issue of Bauer space demands and the Woolworths promotion are connected as they are all part of today’s magazine world. The publisher is doing what it thinks is best to address crashing circulation and in that mix of activities is forcing newsagents to commit to prime space allocation and paying Woolworths to discount titles so as to pull sales from nearby newsagencies.

Yes, this is the conflicting world in which we find ourselves.

What should Bauer do?

They should produce compelling magazines that are highly sought after for content. They should make magazines harder to get. This will see shoppers value them more. They should support newsagents as magazine specialists as I have outlined here before when I called for magazine publishers to ditch support for supermarkets.

Yes, I know, I am not a publisher, what would I know? I could be wrong on this but I think Bauer getting closer to Woolworths will not work for Bauer in terms of their newsagent relationships nor in terms of the long term Woolworths relationship. I see Australia’s two big supermarkets as greedy, selfish and not good for local communities. I’d not want to be part of helping them hurt communities. I see newsagency businesses as family run, and local, vital to local community health. I know which of the two is better for Australia and Australians in my view.