We’re giving the new Big Soups soup cook book from Bauer support by placement at the front of food titles and with another popular soup title.
Our goal is to sell the copy we received in the next couple of weeks before we consider returning it. This prime placement is the best support we can give.
We are promoting the Pacific Magazines Win a Tablet opportunity in three locations in store in three locations including this one with weekly titles. Our promotion and placement activity is tactical – i.e. we’re not going for noise but for focused engagement. Our thinking here is that less is more given all the colour in a newsagency. We are also promoting the competition externally as a traffic-driving opportunity.
Some who have been watching the Wild Cards and Gifts shops since the take over of the group by UK Newsagent retailers WH Smith have noticed recent changes to their focus. The gifts they are pitching are more often now gifts you’d see in Australian newsagencies than was the case under the old ownership.
If this is indeed a trend it will blur the lines between newsagencies and the Wild businesses. This will be especially interesting to watch in locations where newsagencies and Wild compete for the same nearby shopper.
This week I am running a series of simple moves you can make in your newsagency to increase sales. None requires you to spend any money, only time. Here is simple move to make more money by moving spinners.
Do you move your spinners? When was the last time you placed spinners in different locations? If you don’t place your spinners in different locations, are your spinners working as well as you need and or expect? If the answer to this question is no then move them.
Moving a spinner can open the products it holds to shoppers who may not have seen the products in your shop previously.
As a rule, no spinner should be in the same location more than two weeks – except in exceptional circumstances where you know that moving the spinner will love sales.
We need to run our newsagencies with a gift shop approach to the shop floor – major changes every two weeks, following a process of continuous movement.
I’d love to hear from newsagents how the million dollar scratchie game is selling. I noticed street level advertising by Golden Casket in the centre of Brisbane. Indeed, it was terrific to see this advertising to see the game. Scratchie tickets are a good over the counter opportunity as they are a retailer focused product as opposed to OzLotto, Powerball and Lotto tickets that can be purchased online and on your phone.
I love the promotion by Men’s Health magazine to Nexus newsagents of a tipping competition for the World Cup.
This is a good bit of fun for the popular sporting event. It’s pure fun too – no displays to setup, no extra stock to display … no this is purely a tipping competition. Terrific!
With newsagents busy running their own small businesses they often do not have time to connect with others. This type of competition by Men’s Health offers newsagents a bit of social fun around what is set to be a very popular event.
Early this week Pacific Magazines the company sent out a text message to consumers promoting newsagents as the retailers to purchase Pacific titles from to get in the running to win a tablet computer. Out of store marketing like this is terrific for newsagents, providing another reason to support Pacific titles.
The Telegraph has reported that a 11,000 consumers in a recent survey voted WH Smith as the worst high street retailer in the UK. Apple was rated #2 and Lush soap #2. The report is pretty damning.
Dissatisfaction with WH Smith is not new, and it has been one of the lowest-rated shops for the last four years.
Retail expert Mary Portas has described it as a “dump” which she “truly hates” shopping in.
This story would not usually rate a mention in Australia but the growing presence of WH Smith here with their own stores, their growing hospital retail network and their ownership of Wild cards and gifts it’s worth knowing about.
This week I am running a series of simple moves you can make in your newsagency to increase sales. None requires you to spend any money, only time. Here is simple move to make more money by changing your use of your counter.
Take everything off your counter. Now, put something at the counter that you have never had there. Choose products that appeal to your customers. But make sure that your choice challenges your customers and you.
We did this a while back by placing $24.95 plush dogs and cats at the counter – replacing confectionery. Shock horror they sold very well. Amazingly well in fact. Before this experience I would have said that selling $24.94 dogs and cats at the counter would not work.
Your counter space should be part of your continuous improvement commitment. An approach of continuous movement is important on the newsagency shop floor.
This is the main window of a high street newsagency that I saw recently. On the other side of the wall of magazine posters is a fixture with stock. There is room elsewhere on the shop floor for this fixture. Moving it, or trashing it, would free up the window and allow shoppers to see inside. Immediately on doing this a smart retailer would make the shop more appealing to shoppers walking by. This, in turn, should boost sales.
Removing magazine posters in the window of any newsagency is important if the business is to increase relevance to those walking past the business. The old-school approach shown in the photo does not serve the business well.
I appreciate it is easy to stand outside a shop and say what should be done. However, in this instance, moving the fixture could be done with a bit of effort and the positive impact for the business could be considerable.
While I don’t usually have Vanity Fair this latest issue would be one to stock given the extraordinary interest in the hit TV series Game of Thrones. This is an example of where being able to order a one off supply of an issue of a magazine title could help drive sales for us and the publisher. I noticed this issue in an airport location earlier this week.
Kudos to the publishers of Slam Skateboarding and Hello May for their support on Twitter today supporting newsagents. Publishers telling their followers about our channel is excellent practical support we should embrace through our shop-floor actions.
Newsagents: Slam Skateboarding and Hello May deserve our support tomorrow.
This week I am running a series of simple moves you can make in your newsagency to increase sales. None requires you to spend any money, only time. Here is simple move to make more money by creating a dance floor.
In front of your counter, a in a space walked past by more customers that almost any other part of your shop, set aside space that is your swing space, your dance floor.
This is space is your key promo space – where you pitch with your best creativity items you want all your shoppers to see.
On the dance floor you display to sell – with flair, excitement and engagement.
The key is creating the space. I have never been in a newsagency where a dance floor cannot be created.
An approach of continuous movement is important on the newsagency shop floor. A dance floor is key to this continuous movement.
A Bauer merchandiser visited my newsagency yesterday and without discussion with the store manager or any staff and without permission moved a Pacific Magazine title to a sub-standard position and placed a Bauer title into a prime position. I have contacted Bauer with evidence of the move and asked that this merchandiser not visit the business again.
Is this action of moving Bauer titles to better locations than Pacific titles an instruction from Bauer? If so, shame on them. In my communication with Bauer about this yesterday they did not take the opportunity to advise that such a move against a competitor title without in-store permission was against company policy.
Our layout of magazines is specific and thought through. With our weekly magazines experiencing excellent well above average year on year growth we’re doing something right. How dare a Bauer representative mess with something that is working better than in an average newsagency.
This is my shop, I pay the rent. It disgusts me that a person representing Bauer does this without permission.
How can I be certain the Bauer representative did this? I have video evidence. I thought about posting it here – it’s damning.
The publisher of Geelong Coast hit Twitter yesterday promoting newsagents as the go-to retailers for the latest issues. Great stuff!
We are promoting the new SPACES next to sister publication frankie as it’s a title that will appeal to the frankie reader. We also have SPACES with our hoe and living titles – with the full cover on show. We follow the same dual location approach with Smith Journal and it’s the frankie placement that works best for us.
I used to love school excursions and fondly remember visiting the Newcastle steelworks and a Gippsland cheese factory in primary and high school respectively.
Today, I got to go on an excursion to the Chocolate Gems factory in Brisbane. While sure it was wonderful taste-testing, the real pleasure came from learning about the products, how they are made and how they are different to more mass-produced products.
Knowing how this chocolate is made compared to other products helps us better serve customers and better promote the Chocolate Gems product. There is nothing like getting valuable product knowledge direct from the factory floor of the manufacturer.
I recommend Chocolate gems to newsagents – their products are ideal for local store bagging or purchasing pre packaged as gifts. They are also good for singles sales at the counter. The margin is double wham you get from Darrel Lea. They ship in a smart way so that anywhere in Australia the product arrives fresh.
FYI the folks at Chocolate Gems have no idea I am writing this. They have not asked me to. I am mentioning it because what I saw today was a small business operator competing against some massive international businesses. It reminded me of newsagencies and our competitive situation. We need to support more small businesses.
This stunning window display in Brisbane promoting Uppercut Hair Pomade caught my eye this morning.
The goal of any visual merchandising has to be to get you to notice a product. This display worked. I noticed and stopped to look.
The symmetrical placement of the hair pomade product is more impactful and noticeable than a traditional hair products window where products are placed without any wow factor.
We have plenty of products in our newsagencies we can create similarly impactful window displays with.
This week I am running a series of simple moves you can make in your newsagency to increase sales. None requires you to spend any money, only time.
Here is simple move to make more money by getting product adjacencies right.
All it takes is some thinking about who your shopper is and watching how they shop your shop.
Most card purchases are a gift opportunity. So it stands to reason that you have gifts near cards. This is what we have – even though you can’t see the gift department in this photo.
Today’s tip is about what else card customers may purchase. Our reports show they purchase jewellery and premium collectible bears. So, we responded to their interest and moved both to be placed near cards in such a way that 75% of card shoppers will easily see them.
The result is a bump in sales – from a move that took a few minutes to consider and another few minutes to execute.
The key here is looking at your data and watching your customers – and responding to make it easier for them to do what they want.
Success with a product is often as much about placement as it is about the product itself. This is why an approach of continuous movement is important on the newsagency shop floor. Identifying key shopper traffic routs and leveraging these with tactical placement should help you increase your sales.
Click on the image for a larger version.
It’s terrific seeing the publisher of Fortean Times use social media, in this instance Twitter, to promote newsagents as the retailer of their magazine. Their tweet reached out to their 14,900 followers. It’s endorsements like this of the newsagency channel, here and in the UK, that is important to us. Thanks Fortean Times!
I had to visit this bookshop tonight on Mary Street in Brisbane tonight. At 5:20pm the street was dark and this shop stood out. The brightness of the lighting says something about the business. It made me feel I was certain to find a good book there.
Call me crazy but I connected the brightness with optimism.
While there were other shops open on Mary Street, this was by far the best lit, the most visually enticing.
Any retailer on this end of Mary Street competing for a bookshop customer will have to lift their game if they want to compete. The newsagency across the road was open but the lights were dim. It didn’t have the feeling of optimism. This could be fixed with some shop floor changes and fresh lighting.
We compete in an ever changing world and while newsagents often worry about what they cannot change – like online, print disruption and the like – too often they ignore what they can change like in-store lighting.
I found a good book by the way – Prisoner X by Rafael Epstein.
The front page photo on The Courier Mail today is partly obscured by a house ad promoting a subscription offer. So much for the front page of the newspaper driving over the counter sales. To me, the ad gets in the way of the front page news story. It disappoints me to see editorial content treated in this way.
This week I am running a series of simple moves you can make in your newsagency to increase sales. None requires you to spend any money, only time.
Here is simple move to make more money from magazine customers.
Walk down your main magazine aisle and then walk from there to your counter – what do you pass along the way? What is promoted to shoppers walking this path? Do you disrupt shoppers as they walk this and other high-traffic routes in your newsagency?
Click on the photo and notice the card fixture we have placed facing shoppers as they exit the main magazine aisle. I have seen customers notice it when exiting the magazine aisle.
We have had this card unit in this location for couple of weeks. This is about as long as we like to have something here. Change is important – especially at the exit fro the magazine aisle as this is a path many regulars take and they become store blind.
Success with a product is often as much about placement as it is about the product itself. This is why an approach of continuous movement is important on the newsagency shop floor. Identifying key shopper traffic routs and leveraging these with tactical placement should help you increase your sales.
Our supply of Yours was increased by close to 20% by the Bauer Media allocations team without any justification in our sales data. With a consistent (except for one issue) sell-through of between 40% and 50% there is no reason for any increase in supply.
This is gross oversupply by Bauer.
I’d love to know if other newsagents have experienced a similar increase in supply of Yours without justification.
Yours is loss making for us on the current numbers. sales are not covering the retail real-estate and labour involved in carrying the title. the extent of the loss is extended by what to me looks like a broken supply model.
Bauer owned Network Services raves about its Sales Based Replenishment facilities. With Yours being a fortnightly title there are several options for top-up through the on-sale.
A fairer model would be skinnier supply and top up based on sales data. This makes the publisher and distributor more accountable rather than the apparent current model of using the small business newsagent as the warehouse and the back.
We have had our Peppa Pig spinner and products in prime position this past week with Peppa Pig so much in the news following a report that the show may be axed as a result of budget cuts.
While the report of possible axing was soon shut down, the brand got plenty of media coverage so it made sense to me that we exploited this with a refresh of our offer. We did resist the temptation to put up a sign – get your Peppa Pig stocks while they last.
In addition to the plush we have small suitcases, play sets, stationery sets and other items. We’re competing with the majors as well as the ABC Shop – and doing okay.