Sales of weekly magazines dropped significantly the latest sales audit shows: Famous down 17.69%, New Idea down 5.97%, NW down 8.0%, OK! down 17.52%, Take 5 down 7.96%, That’s Life down 11.23%, Who down 8.9% and Woman’s Day down 4.9%. A tough audit all round. AdNews has the details.
The sales decline experienced by capital city newspapers in the latest audit is considerable: The Age, down 15.46%, Sydney Morning Herald 15.23%, The Daily Telegraph down 15.15%, the Herald Sun down 13.19%. Mumbrella has the details.
It’s interesting to see the declines for one newspaper towns: Courier Mail, Advertiser, Mercury – all down significantly.
I noticed more schools and community groups engaged in Halloween events this year – like Spooky Night – Ghosts of Abbotsford Past being run by Abbotsford Primary School. This is the type of event a newsagency could support as part of their Halloween marketing campaign. It’s a good way to support the school and tie in with what your business sells. My experience is that schools welcome support.
Newsagents planning on embracing Halloween next year should reach out to local schools around now and negotiate an exclusive promotion / sponsorship arrangement. The dollars don’t have to be high. Indeed, support could be in the form of an art project.
It’s small marketing projects like this that can be far more beneficial than one large campaign when everyone else is running campaigns.
We received twenty-three (yes, 23!) copies of the Cheesecakes mini cookbook from Bauer yesterday. Under ACP we used to get ten and ended up returning five or six. Bauer takes over and now we get twenty-three. This is ridiculous, a waste of time, space and cash. Maybe this over-allocation is a result of less human resources involved in the allocations process. Something is wrong and if others have been oversupplied like me small business newsagents are suffering the consequences. Bauer are supposed to be the sales based replenishment experts.
Instead of spending money on conferences and training sessions and telling newsagents how important we are to their business, Bauer should invest in a fairer allocations process. This is what newsagents care about the most – fair allocation based on sales data.
The Mega Trading Card Collector Pack units that did not sell when distributed through Network Services have made their way to some newsagencies through Gotch. They – the publisher? the distributor? – didn;t even have the courtesy to remove the old pricing stickers. Appalling.
This scale out of stock that failed to sell is a perfect example of how broken the magazine distribution model is. The stock now doing the rounds again is failed stock. Newsagents are being asked to provide space, labour and cover the freight of stock that fails to sell again.
Magazine publishers who want a healthy newsagency channel need to lobby to fix this. Every time they use magazine distributors they are aiding and abetting this other behaviour that harms us.
The publisher of Hello May magazine has reached out seeking support from newsagents for their unique wedding title. Hello May is a magazine serving a niche in the wedding space that can work well for newsagents considering the wedding related products we sell. Their local vendor support is a message that we know resonates with newsagency shoppers.
Here’s what the publisher wrote today:
Soph here from Hello May.
Just wanted to let you know issue three of Hello May mag hit the newsstands today! I hope you got it in!
The attached flyer should of gone out to all of our stockists today, gosh knows if anyone reads it though, so I was wondering if you were able to help me communicate this message with newsagents through your blog?
Essentially we have offered to keep the mag off our online store for the first 2 whole weeks of on sale in an effort to drive traffic into local newsagents. Hello May is all about supporting the small local vendors in the wedding industry and i believe this small business support should extend to newsagents.
We launched our stockists list on the site today too in an effort to help our readers find local newsagents. Although its super disheartening, after only half a day on sale, to have sooooo many readers email us and say they have been to one, two, three, four (one girl even went to six) stockists on the list only to have the newsagents say they have “never heard of the mag” or “don’t have it in” when i know full well each and every newsagents on that stockists list has been sent the mag AND received the attached PDF.
http://hellomay.com.au/magazine/stockists/
Im at a loss with how else to communicate with newsagents that we are here to support them too, but it goes both ways.
Money trumps editorial again today on the front cover of The Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Not sure why retailers put up with News trying to divert traffic away from their shops. We’re not paid enough margin to justify this type of activity in our space.
This newsagency sales benchmark study is an analysis of sales basket data from 136 newsagencies – city and country, shopping centre and high street, banner groups (various) and independent. To be included, the businesses must have been using the same software for both analysis periods and to be compliant with industry software standards.
To be clear, this is a same store year on year comparison.
Customer traffic. 52% of newsagents recorded an average decline of 3.7% in transactions. 12% reported no change and the rest an average growth of 1.8%.
Overall newsagency sales decline. 63% reported an average revenue decline of 3.6%. Of those reporting growth, the average was 7%.
Basket depth. 48% reported a decrease in basket size (items in the basket) with an average decrease was 1.7%. 26% showed no change. The rest achieved 1.8% growth.
Basket value. 46% of newsagents reported an increase in basket value – with an average of 2.3%.
Product mix. Newspapers and magazines suffered the most, again.
Discounting. The decline in discounting identified in the last three quarters has continued with only 21% of respondents discounting of any significance.
The gap between growing and contracting newsagencies is getting wider. Those growing have a more diverse product offering. The comparison reports show the growing businesses attracting new traffic.
Benchmark results by key departments:
Newsagencies continue to be good businesses to own. They respond to attention. There is good evidence of this in individual store data I have seen. The average newsagency with a retail model 10, 20 and 30 years old is the type of business in trouble. It’s unlikely to be doing anything to insulate against the changes we see impacting traditional lines.
The best type of newsagency to own continues to be the one where you have the most control over what you sell and where you generate traffic for several product categories where average gross profit is 50% or higher.
We create our own luck.
Click here for a PDF of the report.
How should you respond to this study?
Newsagents: look at your business, your sources of traffic, your average GP. Your success will come from many small steps. The most successful newsagencies I see today are run by retailers as retail businesses.
Suppliers: Get smart in your engagement with newsagents. Trust them. Treat them with respect. Share their mission to grow traffic and GP and basket value. Give newsagents complete control over what they sell of your products.
Newsagent suppliers who want a healthy and valuable relationship with newsagents need to read this, all of it … especially if you want to grow the revenue your company achieves through newsagency businesses.
Our channel started with us as agents, being told what to do by everyone dealing with us. While that has changed, key traffic-generating suppliers – newspaper publishers, magazine publishers and distributors, transport operators, telcos and Tatts – continue to treat newsagents as agents. But worse than that, some of them don’t trust newsagents.
Tatts, newspaper publishers and magazine publishers and distributors have the worst track record of trust in and of newsagents – or should I say lack of trust. They all have stories to tell to justify their lack of trust. Here’s a story of trust in newsagents that’s worked for me.
My newsagency software company serves now close to 1,900 newsagents as active customers. That’s a pretty big pool in the channel so my experiences are more than those of a small group, they are genuinely representative.
In March 2009, after reading Jeff Jarvis’ excellent book, What Would Google Do?, I decided to make the process of selecting software update changes more transparent and user-engaged. Fast forward to today, more than four years on, and I am thrilled to share that newsagents actively suggest changes and vote on changes. I gave them far more control than usual for a software company and it’s worked.
Newsagents have benefited from software enhancements they want based on their business experience. The changes have helped drive efficiency. In the last four years the Tower market share in the newsagency channel has grown tremendously – so I have benefited too. Suppliers have benefited too with ideas being passed back, for example, for XchangeIT.
So when a newspaper publisher or magazine distributor or publisher says they can’t trust newsagents to set their own supply I say nonsense, I’d trust them.
The key I have found from my own experience is to create an interface newsagents can use, an interface that is transparent and engenders mutual trust. Provide this and they will use it and deliver more value for your businesses.
My team created Software Ideas at the Tower website and opened this for newsagents to use. Newsagents set the agenda. So much for them not having time or not engaging about business management matters.
By engaging in old-world processes that magazine distributors use today they are forcing the channel to be inefficient, they are forcing us to deliver an outcome that allows them to say we can’t be trusted to serve the needs of the publishers the distributors serve.
My experience has been that if you give newsagents the right tools and freedom and show trust, it will work for newsagents and for you. What I have experienced over the last four years is proof of that.
So I have to ask myself, those who do not engage in a more trust-centred relationship with newsagents – WHY? Maybe to do so would not serve their commercial needs.
If you are a magazine publisher who wants newsagents to set supply, DEMAND IT! You can trust newsagents to do right by your title because their need is aligned with yours. However, ensure that the process is right, transparent and, of itself, trustworthy.
I feel like the newsagency channel in on a merry-go-round sometimes given the regularity with which common problems are reported here and elsewhere. This will continue, sales will fall and old-school suppliers will be less important to us – unless they demonstrate trust in newsagents. We have to break the merry-go-round.
If you’re in or near Townsville then check out the BASA QLD Training day 10th November 2013 (1). This is a day of training on creating balloon displays. Margaret Campbell – a newsagent (with husband john) from Toowoomba, is one of the speakers at the training. This is an idea session for newsagents.
I wish Australian card companies produced the HUGE Christmas cards I’ve seen overseas. I suspect large cards like the cards in the photo would sell in Australia. They a simpler than the large Christmas cards in the UK where a single card is purchased in a gift box. No, these cards in the photo are like the large cards we sell today but they are for Christmas.
We received nine copies of nic & rocco Sweet Sensations. That’s nine copies more than I would have ordered had I been given the opportunity of deciding whether I wanted to invest in the launch of this magazine / cookbook.
That billing is delayed does nothing for me since it takes up space and is a leech title – relying completely on the traffic I generate.
At $19.95 the price is too high. No, there is little going for this title, certainly not enough for be to give it two pockets of space – two pockets because some bright apart decided I needed nine copies. Had they sent three I might have kept it in story. we early returned the lot.
So many titles are coming now with delayed billing that newsagents have caught on and are suspicious about when it’s used … as they should be.
Plenty of people are slamming the move revealed yesterday that Bauer plans to merge the editorial operations of Dolly and Cleo into one. Do a Google search and you;ll see plenty of opinions. The Crikey coverage is the best in my view. Here’s part of what Crikey published on the topic:
Publishing legend Ita Buttrose has joined a chorus of former top editors voicing concern at an “extreme” proposal by magazine giant Bauer Media to merge the reporting staffs of its iconic titles Cleo and Dolly. Bauer staff are also alarmed by the company’s handling of the move, in which the current editors of the magazines have been portrayed as being in a “showdown” and a “fight to the death”.
Under the proposal announced to Bauer Media staff yesterday, the titles would remain separate publications but with only one pool of staff. There would be one editor-in-chief, one managing editor and one publisher overseeing both titles. All staff would have to reapply for their positions, with around half expected to lose their jobs. Either Cleo editor Sharri Markson or Dolly editor Tiffany Dunk is expected to become editor-in-chief.
Buttrose, the founding editor of Cleo, told Crikey: “I know everybody is cost-cutting at the moment, but this seems a bit extreme. You’d have to be a very experienced, very talented editor to put out both titles.
“I ran the women’s division at ACP Magazines, but all the titles had their own clearly defined editors. For one person to edit two magazines — that may be something they do in Germany, but it’s new for me … I’d like to see their business plan.”
Buttrose adds it would be extremely difficult for journalists to write across both titles given Dolly is aimed at teenagers while Cleo is targeted at women in their 20s and 30s.
“It could add to the uncertainty that I hear exists in the company over the future of some of the titles,” she added. “People get very jittery in the when they hear these things are going on.”
A Bauer insider said: “As a strategy, it’s kind of nuts. It’s a silly thing to set the two editors up against each other. They should have made a decision and moved the other one on or found them another role.” Unsurprisingly, the tabloids are revelling in the potential stoush– see today’s Daily Telegraph headline “Battle of the teen mag editors”.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics released retail performance data for the September quarter and the headline run by news outlets was overall good. For data about our channel you need to drill further into the ABS report:
OTHER RETAILING
In current prices, the trend estimate for Other retailing rose 0.1% in September 2013. The seasonally adjusted estimate rose 1.6%. By industry subgroup, the trend estimate rose for Pharmaceutical, cosmetic and toiletry goods retailing (0.4%) and Other recreational goods retailing (0.7%) and fell for Other retailing n.e.c. (-0.2%) and Newspaper and book retailing (-0.5%). The seasonally adjusted estimate rose for Pharmaceutical, cosmetic and toiletry goods retailing (3.1%), Other recreational goods retailing (2.4%) and Other retailing n.e.c. (0.4%) and fell for Newspaper and book retailing (-1.4%).
The state by state breakdown for overall retailing is interesting:
Turnover rose in New South Wales (1.0 per cent), Victoria (1.0 per cent), Queensland (0.8 per cent), South Australia (0.7 per cent), Tasmania (0.7 per cent), the Australian Capital Territory (0.7 per cent) and the Northern Territory (0.7 per cent). These rises were partially offset by a fall in Western Australia (-0.2 per cent). Over the longer term, Victoria was the strongest contributor to growth (up 0.5 per cent in trend terms).
The most important benchmark for newsagents is how their business performed this year compared to last year.
I’m not sure if this is a new policy but I just found out that new newsagents are barred from early returning magazines by Gotch and Network for their first few weeks. In one situation I saw recently a new newsagent had an account for less than $100 for their second month in once they could early return what was not selling.
Check out the stationery business I saw in Auckland a couple of weeks ago – click on the picture. There was no stationery in this shop even though it is called Uptown Stationers. It was all tobacco, drinks, international phone calling cards and junk.
This shop gives stationers a bad name.
We have the Pacific Magazines floor display unit at the front of the newsagency, facing into the mall and packed it with their Christmas-themed titles. As expected, this placement is working. How do we know? We count what we put in the unit. While it was working elsewhere on the shop floor, it’s working better at the front of the newsagency.
If you have one of these units, go check now and ensure you’re using it well.
I promoted this stand here – Pacific had additional stock for any newsagent who wanted to engage.
Victorian newsagents have been hit with newspaper supply cuts from News Corp. as the company seeks to reduce returns volume. As a consequence, many newsagents have been without the Herald Sun and The Australian from mid morning. Getting extra stock that day has been as impossible as setting a requirred supply quantity according to newsagents I have spoken with.
One newsagent has been losing sales of 50 to 70 copies a day while another lost several hundred sales over the weekend.
I can’t work out why News would be happy to lose newspaper sales like this. There are some in the company who are working hard at helping newsagents deal with the situation while others have overseen the process that has created the problem.
Newsagents who order a magazine they do not usually stock for a customer put away request often find that the distributor adds to the requested quantity. We need to be able to order a fixed number, as a put away request, and not be burdened with additional stock for which we have no space nor time to manage. Smart newsagents know more than magazine distributors what will sell.
We have placed the Flat Belly Diet Gluten-Free Cookbook next to Prevention as this is a brand extension for the magazine. My experience is that embracing brand extension opportunities like this drives sales of the cookbook as well as the magazine. Yes, I’d like book margin on the cookbook. However, billing is delayed to January bu which time it will be sold or returned so I’m happy.
News Corp. is delaying the introduction of DTI Circulation – its national circulation and subscriptions system which is already in place across New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. No reason has been given for the delay in SA. News has advised that the WA implementation will be undertaken later this month.
Newsagencies are excellent businesses for playing between major seasons with new seasonal opportunities yet many do not embrace these. Take Movember, I bet most reading this don’t see it as a retail season opportunity for newsagents.
We have embraced Movember: sourced a range of themed products and placed it on the lease line – facing into the mall. In 24 hours its moving.
Yesterday I saw first-hand this small display attract several shoppers. One commented that they liked we are donating a portion of sales to men’s health research.
I’m certain some people buying moustache products from us this year will come to use next year remembering we’re the shop with these items.
There is no one big move a newsagent can make to attract many new shoppers. Success comes from many small steps. Embracing the Movember opportunity is an example of one valuable and differentiating small step newsagents can take.
Footnote: The Movember products and promotion are a newsXpress newsagency marketing group initiative. I’m a Director of newsXpress.
It’s easy to whip newsagents into a frenzy about magazine supply, lottery competition or late newspapers but almost impossible to achieve the same attention and comment about employee theft, poor business planning or falling stationery sales.
I am concerned that as a channel we like to complain about the parts of our businesses over which we have the least control while ignoring opportunities to complain about ourselves and our poor stewardship of those parts of our businesses over which we have the most control.
The data reported by our computer systems tell us the truth. They tell us how stationery, gift, toy, card and other sales are year on year. yes, I include cards in this list over which we have control because it’s time newsagents realised that they have more influence over their card sales than their supplier.
My management challenge to newsagents today is – next time you are about to criticise a supplier, pays and think whether you hold your own performance over your business to the same standard. Look at your year on year business data. It won’t lie. If your stationery, gift, card, toy and plush sales are down it’s 100% on you. If magazine, newspaper, lottery and agency sales are down, you;re playing a role in that decline.
Embrace the truth of your data and use it to guide where you need to focus your attention.
This month, American Express is promoting Shop Small, a month-long campaign promoting engagement with small business. News Corp. promoted the campaign with a story on October 31. While I like the goal of the campaign, it’s unfortunate that one of their partners is Officeworks, a BIG business that seeks to attract shoppers from small business newsagents and independent stationers.
The folks at American Express should have realised that Officeworks is not an idea partner for the Shop Small campaign – they are the only partner I’d nominate as not ideal for this campaign promoting small business. The participating associations, including COSBOA, should have noticed this and advised American Express to not take the Officeworks sponsorship.
Officeworks will argue that they serve small businesses, which they do. However, they do this at a cost to many more small businesses. If the campaign is to be true to its principles then Officeworks ought not be included as a sponsor.
I’ve been fortunate to see a stationery relay managed by GNS in a newsagency in Victoria I have been helping over the last few weeks.
GNS has managed rejigging the stationery range and merchandising the product onto the hang-sell fixtures. The result looks excellent. Better still, the product is selling. The GNS representative worked to a tight budget on new sock and lived within a tight space allocation.
Hearing positive comments from customers is encouragement that you’re on the right path. Seeing sales growth from stationery shows this to be the case.
What has happened in this business is an excellent example of a proactive GNS representative genuinely helping a newsagent to grow stationery sales.