I urge newsagents to ensure the full cover of the latest issue of Feast magazine is on show. It stands out against the sea of colour in the magazine aisle. We co-loate Feast for the first couple of weeks – usually with weekly magazines or at the sales counter, to leverage the regular ads on SBS.
People purchasing Taste magazine at Coles get a set of bamboo salad servers. I’m not so sure it will affect our sales since the magazine looks better in newsagencies un-bagged than it does in Coles. The gift is good but not great. My only frustration is the notice on the bag that the gift is exclusive to Coles.
Here is a press release from a couple of days ago about the launch of The Saturday Paper, a new newspaper that will be sold through newsagents.
Schwartz Media is happy to announce that The Saturday Paper, a quality weekly newspaper from the publisher of the Monthly, will launch in print and online on March 1.
The Saturday Paper can also announce the first of its contributors – a stable of the best writers in Australian journalism, as well as new voices and well known figures who have not previously appeared in print.
David Marr, the country’s finest long-form journalist, joins the paper as a columnist. Hamish McDonald joins as world editor and Kirsty Simpson as business editor. Martin McKenzie-Murray joins The Saturday Paper as chief correspondent in Melbourne and Sophie Morris, formally of the Australian Financial Review, will write as Canberra correspondent. Richard Cooke has been appointed sports editor.
Christos Tsiolkas, the author of The Slap and Barracuda, is The Saturday Paper’s film critic. He is joined by Tim Freedman and Dave Faulkner, who will write as the paper’s music critics. Helen Razer will write on television for the paper.
Andrew McConnell, the owner of Cutler & Co., joins as food editor. Women’s Wear Daily correspondent Patty Huntington will work as the paper’s fashion editor and Lucy Feagins from The Design Files will anchor its interiors content. Mungo MacCallum will provide his storied cryptic crossword each week.
More names will be announced as The Saturday Paper approaches its launch on March 1. Publisher Morry Schwartz said: “This is a list of big voices and brilliant writers. I am enormously proud to publish each of them. The Saturday Paper is materialising before our eyes as a major force in Australian journalism.”
The Saturday Paper’s editor, Erik Jensen, said: “Assembling this team has been a pleasure. Almost 500 journalists applied for positions on The Saturday Paper – people of enormous talent that made choosing our journalists both easy and extremely difficult. I am sure the team we have will produce the best narrative journalism in Australia and, from hard news to lifestyle, will make The Saturday Paper a compulsory read.”
The Saturday Paper is a quality weekly newspaper, dedicated to long-form journalism – to writing that breaks big stories and gets behind the news of the week. It will be available in print in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, and as a website and an app everywhere else.
The Saturday Paper is offering a Foundation Subscriber price of $99 for a year’s print subscription. The paper’s cover price is $3.
I heard a social media expert recently telling a group of small business retailers that they should pay his company to run their special media program for them. His pitch was compelling. He had lots of success stories, I was impressed as were many who were at the presentation. He made it sound easy, that using social media for your business could be automated.
The pitch was cleverly preying on people in the audience not understanding social media, it was leveraging their ignorance to have them pay for an outcome without understanding the process.
Whether you use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ or other social media platforms, the most valuable voice your online presence has is your voice.
You can’t pay someone to speak for you, certainly not a service provider business that spends an hour a month or less on your business.
Unfortunately we there are many consultancy businesses and service providers offering to run social media for small businesses including newsagencies. Some I have looked at are clueless. Others are lazy. Others use technology to automate updates. In each case, your voice is lost, the tweets, Facebook posts and Pinterest pins are not from you and as such are removed from who you are and what you stand for.
You or a trusted long-term employee are the best people to speak for your business through social media.
Using a social media consultancy would be like paying someone else to mingle with your customers or paying for an automated posting service would be like using a robot to do this for you. neither case works for small business. Small retail businesses like newsagencies are personal. Our tweets need to be personal. Our Facebook posts need to be personal. This can only happen if you control it.
Yes it is time consuming and time is a resource you probably lack. However, if you want the best outcome you want the best person on the job. That’s you or a trusted colleague. You can’t contract out someone else as the voice for your business.
The social media expert I heard speak recently claimed that automated posts were the way to go, ignoring that good social media engagement is conversations, many conversations. Conversations rely on humans on both sides actively engaged with each other.
My advice to small business newsagents of social media is to speak for yourself. Take small steps. Find your voice. Speak for your own business by talking about what matters to you and your customers. You don’t need to pay someone to do this for you.
For more reading on this, check out: Sunday newsagency marketing tip: use social media for a conversation.
Coles is running with some interactive plush for Valentine’s Day. The bear in the photo is pretty cool. A few seconds after clicking the on button, the words, BE MINE, appear and spin around. It’s $15 – good value at this price. I was pleased to see their Valentine’s Day cards more than 100 metres away from their Valentine’s Day plush.
The subscription card that fell out of the US edition of Time magazine pitches a compelling offer: $3.00 an issue posted versus $7.00 an issue in store. Thankfully, the publisher of Time has most subscription offers floating loose in the magazine – if they fall out I don’t replace them. I’m not paid to do that.
With the iPad Air still selling well it’s timely we are able to promote this magbook created specifically for the title. We have it in our technology magazines as well as with news magazines. We will also give it a shot with newspapers.
The media pages of The Australian newspaper today continue the co-ordinated News Corp attack on the ABC. This time, they are calling the death of journalism standards at the ABC.
The relentless attacks on the ABC by the News Corp. media outlets are disgusting. They are designed to achieve a commercial outcome for the company, nothing more. Their federal election victory has gone to their head.
News Corp. questioning the journalism standards of the ABC would be laughable if it were not such a serious matter.
While the ABC is not perfect, their journalism is of a considerably higher standard than that published by News Corp. newspapers.
The Australian today is reporting that Fairfax is closing its Drive advertising business, maintaining the brand for content only. no announcement from Fairfax yet.
UK retail newsagency giant WH Smith has purchased the Wild Cards and Gifts business. The former owners of Wild have announced the sale to suppliers and franchisees. I note that WH Smith is yet to publish a statement about this to investors.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the Wild stores. Do they become WH Smith stores and follow the UK model or do they remain as Wild and through them provide the company an opportunity to develop the local card and gift model. Or, do they evolve to something we are yet to see. The Wild statement to suppliers and franchisees says the Wild model will continue:
Their aim is to grow WILD Cards & Gifts in a professional and sustainable way both in Australia and potentially overseas in the future. They have a number of profit improvement programs planned for stores and will deliver these as 2014 unfolds.
Wile I understand the aim as outlined in the statement from Wild,WH Smith is an aggressive and innovative retailer. The company is constantly playing with its models. I say models as WH Smith stores vary in shape, size, product range and retail situation. They are clear in their mission when it comes to retail:
Located in areas that vary in many ways, we are experts at flexing our space and product mix to fit the specific needs of each location. Working closely with our landlords we create new and exciting shopping experiences in both high street and travel locations.
Regardless of what WH Smith ultimately do with the Wild stores, this move will have extraordinary ramifications for key parts of the Australian newsagency and gift channels. Suppliers, landlords and newsagents will (should) all be watching. Like any disruptive move, it is certain to drive others to act.
2014 is shaping up as a year of considerable change in and near the newsagency channel and in this change we can find opportunities.
Any announcement of the purchase of the Wild business would be big. That it has been purchased by a UK company with an extraordinary pedigree in the newsagency and related retail spaces makes it extraordinary. It is the kind of move that does not happen in isolation.
You can see what I have written about WH Smith over the years here.
I met plenty of newsagents at the Reed Melbourne Gift Fair which started on the weekend. I bet by the time the fair is over several hundred newsagents will have been through. While not the biggest gift fair of the year, this event is well worth visiting.
The representation of homewares, jewellery, toys, baby items and even outdoor items was excellent. Well worth seeing.
My POS software company has a stand at this fair and the first two days have been very busy talking with gift shop owners, newsagents, jewellers and fashion business owners. Indeed, the mix of retailers is broad. It’s mixing with such a diverse crowd that I found valuable when I was looking at the fair as a newsagent.
The timing of the fair is excellent with retailers cashed up from Christmas. That was obvious from the spending I could see.
The International New York Times has a stand promoting subscriptions at the Melbourne Gift Fair. Their pitch was compelling: A$1 for 12 weeks access. Talk about disruptive pricing. The problem is the A$3.75 a week price for iPhone access thereafter. That’s too high. I suspect people are more likely to spend on a local paper app unless the cost is kept to a few cents a day – such is the price expectation for digital access.
We all know our businesses right? We live them every day and see them as straightforward. Most likely, we think they make sense, we think they are understandable and we think everyone who shops with us understands the business.
How would you explain your newsagency business to someone who has never seen one before?
By explain, I mean explain fully so they understand the business just from your description – no photos – and its place in the retail mix, the service it provides and the necessity for this. How would you explain its relevance? How would you explain its future? How would you explain why you own it, what it means for you?
I was involved in a business workshop recently where I face the same question. It’s tough to do, to explain your business with only your words and with the person listening having no reference point whatsoever other than what you say.
The explanation you will likely result in you thinking about and seeing your business differently. This is the goal of the exercise – to dislodge the everyday view and dig underneath for what we are not seeing every day.
How we see our businesses today can be useful in considering our future.
Regular emails with promotions can reconnect past shoppers with your business and attract them back based on what you;re promoting.
Pacific Magazines through their free Nexus program provides newsagents with a free email marketing platform. If you are a in Nexus you should be sending an email out every fortnight. Plus you should be seizing every opportunity to harvest customer email addresses. Pacific is happy for newsagents to promote anything using the free emails.
I’ve heard of plenty of email campaigns working for newsagents. I use them.
While we get plenty of advice from people inside our newsagencies, how much advice and feedback do we get from the community outside? By connecting with local clubs and community groups and using local services, we give people and opportunity to provide us feedback.
One way to get feedback is to offer to speak at a local community group – maybe sponsor them and this can open the door. Just by putting yourself out there you’re likely to be in front of people who do not frequent your business and in doing so let them see that you’re not the person they have heard gossip about or that you are not the person they assumed you were. They feedback could help you see something that needs addressing in your business that you have missed.
The more you are in front of people in your community who do not currently shop at your newsagency the more opportunities for attracting them to your business.
My feeling is that newsagency businesses in shopping malls rely more on passers-by than newsagencies on the high street – maybe more so in capital city locations than in regional and rural situations. My own experience is that around a third of all customers are not regulars. This makes the display at the front of the business mission-critical. Get this wrong and we reduce the traffic drawn into the business.
The photo shows the front of the newsagency as it was yesterday. On the left we have a gift feature with Valentine’s Day plush at the front, next to this is an alley of three spinners (behind each other) featuring popular plush, then a magazine floor unit from Pacific Magazines and then three units of Valentine’s Day cards and on the far right, two posters promoting an in-store competition (one customer will win a tablet computer) connected with an ink campaign.
We adjust the front-of-store pitch during the week and make more significant changes on the weekend. We leave two key traffic routes with enough room either side for a shopping trolley.
In our displays across the front of the newsagency we seek to be: relevant to people in the mall, interesting, reflecting value and fun.
The measures of success are foot traffic followed by sales. We measure ourselves against ourselves and not an expectation as to what a newsagency is. Year on year, traffic and sales are ahead of the newsagency channel average.
I am posting this information here to show that it’s not rocket-achieve. No, running a successful newsagency today is all abut being an engaged retailer responding to changes around us and customer demand.
Click on the image for a larger version.
We early-returned AWW Low fat family food because we’re satisfied with our range of food magazines and are concerned at the $29.95 price point. We have plenty of low-cost cookbooks on which we make 45% and more. This title is a good example of a product for which our gross profit should be significantly more than 25%.
One thing to look for when hiring new employees is how long they have stayed in previous roles. If you like continuity in your business, look for people who stay with a business longer, especially if you are hiring for a full time role.
It’s important to take time to look at employment history, even when someone is with the one company for years. If they are changing roles every year or 18 months, maybe their eyes are always on their next role and not their current role. Healthy suspicion is important.
In corporate businesses developing intellectual property this is especially important. A candidate who has moved from role to role in two years or less will not get an interview with me. I’m a loyal employer and look for loyal employees. Resume builders – people who chase early success and then jump to another role to build their resume – are of less value to a business than more stead employees who may not be chest-beating stars but who do deliver stability and commercial benefit over the long-term.
It is hard to spot the resume builder. They are usually charming and can attract you to wanting them on your team with ease. Too often you don’t see them for what they are until it’s too late, until they have crashed and burned or have started to move to their next opportunity outside their current role – a role they have often not fulfilled.
This discussion about resume builder, selfish and opportunistic employees, can also apply to some people who work for suppliers we encounter or supplier businesses themselves in the newsagency channel – suppliers who come in and say they will save the day or who will give us new purpose. Often these people and businesses enter the channel in a blaze of publicity, talking up their past, attracting followers through charisma and show. Too often, they depart without delivering on their promises.
Newsagents need to be as wary of new suppliers as they are of prospective employees. We need to do thorough due diligence and engage with healthy skepticism. While we will want a smart, articulate and inspiring prospective employee or supplier to be good, great!, for our business, we need to impose a reality check and take time to see if they are likely to deliver on their words.
Now more than ever newsagents need employees and suppliers who can help us embrace change but who have the commitment, stamina and understanding to walk with us for the marathon. That’s what we are in – a marathon, not a sprint.
We are promoting the latest Mollie Makes magazine with our Valentine’s Day offer as well as in the usual location. The 50s-inspired faux leather heart brooch stands out from the cover and should help us drive incremental sales from the Valentine’s Day display. This is another example of how we can innovate more than our competitors in the magazine space.
We sold close to $300 worth of Chinese New year cards and red packets over the last week. Even yesterday we had traditional Aussie customers purchasing the cards for family and friends. The commercial and social importance of this season is growing for those who embrace it. Our sales helped that we had cultural advice on what to write in the cards.
Happy New Year to all for whom the new lunar year is just starting. May the year of the horse be healthy, prosperous and happy.
The photo is from one of the public squares in Guangzhou. Behind the large display is 1,000 stalls from which people will be buying flowers and plants mainly as part of the New year tradition.
I’d be interested in feedback from newsagents about their experience in getting rebates from Bauer owed under the growth incentive program that was launched a couple of years ago. While the program as launched is no longer, I have heard that monies owed from last year has not been paid.
The incentive program was always going to be a challenge given the way it was structured. I made this paint to the folks at ACP at the time.
Ten years ago the then federal Minister for Small Business Joe Hockey launched the magazine distributor and newspaper publisher mandated new newsagency training program at the offices of the ANF in Sydney. I was at the launch and supported the introduction of the training.
The goal of the five-day training program was to ensure that all new newsagents had a consistent base level of training in the operation of a newsagency, especially newsagency-specific aspects of the business.
Over time, with course materials not keeping up with real-world changes, tough training requirements from the various lottery businesses and other obligations on new newsagents, the ANF course faded in relevance.
A few months ago, the five day training requirement for new newsagents was dropped. Neither the magazine distributors or newspaper publishers require that such training be undertaken.
While it is good that this barrier to entry has been removed and that training that had become irrelevant was no longer forced on new newsagents, it’s appropriate to take a moment to think about this move and consider what it could mean, if anything. For example, does the removal of the requirement of training mean our channel is not as important as it once was?
My understanding is that those behind the decision say the training requirement was eliminated because it was not making any difference. If that was the case they could have driven changes to the training since they had exerted control over training course content in the past.
It’s is interesting to think this through. On the one hand we want to be treated the same as other magazine and newspaper retailers but then we could worry when special treatment or attention is removed.
While I doubt we would get a completely honest answer, I’d like to know from magazine publishers and distributors whether they see us as relevant today as they did ten years ago. I think we need to ask this question. If we look at the regulation and monitoring imposed on newsagents via XchangeIT we could say that nothing has changed. But if we consider the elimination of the requirement for consistent basic training for new entrants to the channel I am not so sure.
While many newsagents are angry at the treatment of the channel by some magazine publishers and the two major magazine distributors and may not care about the training, I think we need to consider it a reflection on bigger issues, bigger challenges for us.
What do our businesses look like without magazines? I for one would not like to see this. However, I want fair and equitable supply. Unfair and inequitable supply makes me think about life without magazines – but on my terms. The removal of the training requirement leaves me wondering if the decision about the future of magazines in the channel is being made elsewhere.
I was on Apple’s AppStore last night and noticed this ad: Magazines for Him. Clicking on the ad and I was offered what at first appeared to be free access to apps for Rolling Stone, Money, T3 and other titles. With many magazine apps, however, the content is not free, just the app for accessing the content. But that’s not what I wanted to write about this morning.
Seeing the ad for magazines reminded me of a fundamental change impacting retailers, including newsagents, today. We – retailers, wholesalers and product manufacturers – are in a race to get to the consumer first. The days of the shop being the place where things are bought are over. The shop is but one location. Today people are shopping in every location possible, they are shopping 24/7. That is how large online and bricks and mortar retailers see it. They are investing in strategies to be first to the consumer, anticipating their needs if possible so they can decrease the time between desire and fulfilment.
Retailers who focus only on their shop have an incomplete business strategy. Growth today more than ever required a multi-layered multi-channel strategy.
The question we newsagents need to ask ourselves individually is what are we doing to tap into the shop anytime shop anywhere mindset of today’s mobile consumer?
To get a feeling for how retail is changing: there was a story a couple of days ago about Amazon patenting an anticipatory shipping system that predicts orders. Their algorithm predicts what you may purchase based on previous purchases and it will ship those items to the warehouse closest to you – to reduce the time it takes to fulfil your order. This is pretty amazing stuff.
While in the US a couple of weeks ago I met with a company and was shown technology that retailers like newsagents can integrate with that enables us to capture a shopper interested in a product or category before they are near our shop.
These are just two of the moves that we need to factor into our business plans. On first glance they may feel too complex for us to engage with. the reality is that these and other moves are do or die for retailers. This is the world we are in today – the rules have been set by others, we have to engage for our businesses to have value.
It may sound trite but we newsagents can do this, we can embrace the new shopping model and be relevant as a small independent retailer. It starts with becoming aware and that is, in part, what this blog post is about.
Engagement with customers is key to our future. Connecting them with us so they remember us and come back to us is key. There are various ways newsagents can do this today. Those who are not, and that’s the majority of the channel, risk the commercial consequences of a disconnect from our customers.
I’m optimistic about retail and newsagencies. Yes I see plenty of change, but this is not new. We have to face it and walk with it, changing our businesses appropriately.
On the small issue of magazine apps being available through the Apple AppStore: this is what publishers need to do – and, yes, they need to do it directly and not through newsagents. We are not entitled. repeat: we are not entitled.
The front page headline on the Herald Sun newspaper today is promoting a 23% discount for seven-day home delivery. So much for headlines selling newspapers. Retail only newsagents might want to remove this as a courtesy for the many customer who remove these stickers themselves.