The latest issue of Cosmos magazine is an opportunity for us to promote the title outside its usual location. The Sniffing Cancer cover story is sure to interest people who would not usually browse the magazine. We have placed stock with our weeklies.
Despite a sell through of less than 30%, Network Services fails to reduce our supply of Fishing Downunder to a fair level. I’m sure other newsagents are oversupplied with this title as well. It’s loss-making for us.
Elle magazine is the subject of a rumour published by Crikey today:
Elle: it might well be a fizzer. Word on the street and within newsagent circles is that the rebirth of the Australian Elle magazine may be a fizzer. Piles of the Bauer-produced product can be seen from the doorway and more than one newsagent has reported that the other fashion magazines are still selling at the same levels as pre-Elle.
So I say, how are your Elle sales? In one store I’ve sold 3 out of 20, in another 3 sold out of 14 and in another 6 out of 11. For a launch receiving considerable advertising support these numbers are lower than I’d expect.
In news that will frustrate newsagents who care about magazines, Network Services continues to shed customer-facing staff, reducing the support services for newsagents chasing resolution of magazine over and undersupply issues.
Network is also reportedly about to change their internal magazine allocations system from one that involved considerable human review of allocations to one that uses only 10% of human review time. The risk of supply errors as a result of less human oversight is significantly enhanced by this move.
I’m told these changes are in direct response to the Bauer driven cost cutting of the magazine publishing and distribution organisation.
Network continues to frustrate newsagents by offering a website that does not provide us with reasonable control over magazine supply. For example, it is impossible for newsagents to make a change and be certain of the result – all they can do is ask and hope that someone sometime in Network will approve.
As we have seen in recent weeks, oversupply is on the increase of Bauer titles and other titles distributed by Network Services. This increase in oversupply disadvantages newsagents, it makes us less competitive.
One person put it to me that the Bauer people have little experience at dealing directly with a retail channel like newsagents, that their experience is more with major retailers, like supermarkets.
It appears from the outside looking in that there are fewer people supporting the newsagency channel within Bauer today compared to when it was ACP magazines and part of Nine Entertainment.
The Sunday Age had an excellent article by John Elder yesterday about teen and adult males who like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic – they’re called Bronies. Besides providing an excellent insight into a fascinating phenomenon, the article also opens an opportunity for newsagents to understand that plush products can be sold to more than what we consider to be the traditional customer.
An informal survey at herdcensus.com places the U.S. Brony population at somewhere between 7 and 12.4 million. Using this as a base we can estimate the possible size of the community in Australia.
Whereas in the past we would have created a My Little Pony plush and toy display focussing on your girls, we now need to be open to a more inclusive display. We also need to consider that the factors which make My Little Pony popular with some males could also drive popularity of other plush lines.
I know from my own experience that plush items are purchased by a broad cross-section of people, certainly broader than what newsagents not selling plush tell me they would expect. For example, I have a guy in his thirties who comes in regularly for new Ty branded plush. He’s collecting because he loves the brand.
The Brony phenomenon is something for us to understand and embrace as newsagents are well-placed to serve this community.
There is more reading available on the Brony phenomenon here, here and even here at The Wall Street Journal.
The announcement Friday by Fairfax that they will close the weekly print edition of BRW in a couple of months is not unexpected. The title has struggled for sales for a long time, often not paying for the retail space it occupies in-store. It is part of a segment of magazine titles that is significantly challenged with equivalent content available online.
With the slim size of The Australian Financial Review I do wonder how much longer it will be published in print form. take the friday edition, for example. If you remove Domain you’re left with a pretty slim publication. Greg Hywood, CEO of Fairfax, is on the record saying print publications will be closed or frequency cut when they no longer pay their way.
The folks behind the Australian Moto GP on Phillip Island next weekend have been using Twitter and Facebook to promote newsagents as the go to retailers for the program. Their 6,387 Twitter followers and 23,670 Facebook page followers have been told to shop with us. I love it when publishers reach out to people who they know will buy their products and promote us.
I like this promotion of mentos with Woman’s Day I saw recently. It’s not promoting discount magazines like the buy 3 and buy 2 packs we’re seeing too much of. Pitching two products from different categories in a bundled offer is a good way to drive sales of both items.
Some newsagents like agency products because they attract traffic and traffic presents up-selling opportunities. I have created a two-question survey about up-selling and would appreciate your input.
Next time there is a market near your newsagency, book a market stall and promote some of what you sell in your shop at a stall at the market. Even a car boot market would work. But be sure to brand the stall to promote your shop.
If your experience is like others I have spoken to you’ll have some regular customers buying items from the stall and saying you should sell these in your shop. Rather than being frustrated by such a comment, take it as advice that you need to find a way to cut through with product displays and placement.
Another option is to book a local hall and create your own market situation. In the run up to Christmas you could create a pop-up shop and run this for,say, a week – offering great Christmas gifts at bargain prices. Just taking some of what you currently sell and adding to this with extra stock you would most likely find that you can maintain an excellent margin.
While there is a bit of work organising a second temporary location, done well the reward should be worth it.
Shopping centre based newsagents have plenty of opportunities for outposts. While they can be excellent, my marketing tip this week is to break free from being out the front or close to your shop. The goal is to find genuinely new shoppers.
Footnote: one newsagent doing this a few years back found another stall holder selling products stolen from the newsagency. So, you never know what you’ll find when you get outside your shop and look around.
I have been working with a couple of newsagents recently to help them each get to an accurate P&L and Balance Sheet so they can sell their business. I’ve had the help of a qualified accountant who has experience doing the accounts for several newsagency businesses. In each case, the accountants used by the newsagents charged too much to produce financials that are inaccurate and cannot be used in the sale of the business. In one case their accountant wanted to charge thousands to fix the botched job.
It’s important to choose an accountant who understands the nature of your newsagency business. Recommendation from a newsagent you trust would be a good guide in my view. Choosing an accountant because they are local could lead to your business being poorly served as has happened to these two businesses I have been working with.
While it’s disappointing to see Fairfax sell space covering news headlines for another post-it note ad on The Saturday Age, the ad for Harvey Norman is interesting. It asked people to redeem the note for a free mug … an interesting traffic generating promotion from the retailer.
A lady bought flowers for her church from a nearby newsagency and had to return to the shop when she discovered the receipt showed she’d bought lottery tickets and not flowers. She needed a correct receipt for reimbursement.
On checking, the newsagent could not find the sale of flowers in the computer system for that amount. What was even more surprising was that they could not find a sale of lottery tickets at the time on the Point of Sale software receipt for the same amount.
Unable to reconcile the data, the newsagent called in the employee on the counter at they time asking why they could not find the lottery sale on the lottery terminal or the flower sale on the POS system. The employee advised that the lottery sale did not exist.
This employee, it turns out, would ask customers if they wanted a receipt before processing the sale and if the answer was no and the sale value was high, $20 or more, they would ring the sale up as lottery products. The employee kept a tally o their iPhone. Then, later in the day, they would buy lottery tickets to the value they had accrued in the POS software. The register would balance and they theft was not caught because the newsagent was not reconciling stock on hand.
The lady from the church had said no to a receipt. On realising she needed one to claim the cost of the flowers she returned to the shop and asked for one. This is how she ended up with a receipt for a lottery purchase equal to the value of the flowers she bought.
The employee admitted theft and was sacked. The police were called. The newsagent stopped looking for evidence after going through several months of data and getting to a theft value of $70,000.
Had this newsagent been controlling their stock and checking discrepancies they would have found the theft sooner and saved tens of thousands of dollars.
This story illustrates the potential cost of poor stock management.
A newsagency I spoke with recently discovered an employee theft problem including cartons of cigarettes among other things. They were not stock-taking cigarettes as they thought it was too hard to get it right. It turns out the challenge was the employee who was stealing and hurting the quality of their data.
The newsagent chose to blame their system and or process and gave up when if=n fact the discrepancies should have been taken as an alarm that they were being stolen from.
There is no excuse to stock-taking cigarettes. If you’re not doing it you’re missing the opportunity for early detection of theft and you are missing the opportunity for more accurate ordering of stock.
What frustrates me is that I encounter there every month or so – a newsagent uncovering long-term theft that includes cigarettes and that they are not using stock control for cigarettes. These newsagents have themselves to blame.
First we had a hit with the hand-grenade dog toys and now we have these hand-grenade themed alarm clocks. They’re a cool gift certain to appeal to a specific demographic. These clocks are part of a broader range of clocks we have in our expanded gift department in the lead up to Christmas.
Boot camps are all the rage right now – parks and beaches are busy with groups of people engaged in boot camp training. Best Body Boot Camp, a new mag book just released, taps into that interest. We are promoting the title with fitness magazines as well as near our weeklies to ensure its seen by people who could buy on impulse.
I’ve heard this morning of reported problems with barcodes on Tatts terminal produced lottery tickets. There is no problem. Any newsagent experiencing an issue should call their newsagency software company to get them to properly program their barcode scanner. The 02 variable weight and variable measure barcode being used by Tatts is an international standard as defined by GS1.
Some newsagents like agency products because they attract traffic and traffic presents up-selling opportunities. Some suppliers argue that agency commission can be low because of up-selling opportunities for newsagents. I have created a two-question survey about up-selling and would appreciate your participation. Please click on the link to have your say.
Yesterday we received more copies of AWW cookbook titles for which we still had plenty of stock. Bauer would know our stock holding from their own data yet they sent us more stock. The only conclusion available is that they found extra stock and decided it’s better in newsagencies with us paying for it than leaving it on the warehouse floor and not generating cash-flow.
When Bauer purchased ACP the commentary was that they would be frugal managers of the business. To me they look mean in their dealings with newsagents – oversupplying more often than before. Their actions in the last six months have seen a return to the bad days of Network Services.
Network used to be pretty bad but through 2009, 2010, 2011 and into the start of 2012 they had, overall, improved. Now it’s worse than ever. New titles coming out when we have no room and more stock of existing titles without sales data justification.
Either the Bauer allocations system is a mess or they are deliberately treating newsagents appallingly and lumping us with stock such that it puts us at a commercial disadvantage.
Did anyone else get more AWW cookbook titles yesterday for which they still had stock?
In our case we early-returned.
We early returned the Girls of Zoo 2014 Calendar since it does not meet calendar margin requirements. Publishers need to understand that the 50% is the minimum reasonable margin for calendars and diaries with 60% preferable. Plus we want complete control over what we get. It’s what the major calendar publishers give us.
The free gemstone gift with purchase with the latest take 5 magazine is proving to be popular. I saw a noticeable lift in sales today. If suspect this is due to the extra real-estate being grabbed by the title thanks to the promotion insert.
We are promoting New Idea Christmas & Holiday Essentials with the magazine, with food titles and in this impulse purchase display unit near the main sales counter. We’re chasing early engagement with our three locations. We’ll adjust this based on sales. Kudos to pacific as supply in in-line with what I’d expect based on previous sales.
Some newsagents like agency products because they attract traffic and traffic presents up-selling opportunities. Some suppliers argue that agency commission can be low because of up-selling opportunities for newsagents. I have created a two-question survey about up-selling and would appreciate your participation. Please click on the link to participate.
Your response will help inform suppliers about how important (or otherwise) up-selling opportunities are to you.
The report on McPhersons Media Group in Shepparton by Alan Kohler published by The Australian today is a terrific read about a newspaper publisher. This is a good publishing company with a track record of engagement with newsagents.
No matter whether you are selling products at full price or discounting them you need to sell them. This means you need to merchandise them so the offer is compelling, easy to shop and appealing enough to attract browsers. This is especially true for products of style – such as the Top Model range.
The photo is from a newsagency I visited a couple of weeks ago. I’ve faded the edges and made it black and white so the source is not obvious since I am using the image only to illustrate my point and not finger the business.
If I was discounting a premium line like Top Model, which I am not, I’d do a bundled deal like buy three for two or even two for one or something along those lines. A % off discount and stock dumped in crappy old dump bins disrespects the Top Model range and the business its in front of.
If something is not selling in your store you have to first off look at your own contributions to causing this situation. Just as we create our own success, we often create our own failure.