A blog on issues affecting Australia's newsagents, media and small business generally. More ...

ANF survey results rank achieving equitable magazine supply as the most important newsagency channel issue

144 people participated in my Newsagents and the ANF survey. Equitable magazine supply is what people want the ANF engaged in the most while A bill payment platform is what people want the least. These responses are not unexpected.

I am not surprised that the majority want the ANF engaged in Lobbying politicians – something the organisation has done consistently and effectively for years now.

I am surprised by the disinterest in Western Union, A parcel pickup/drop off service and in the ANF Running newsagent industry awards.

Anyone representing newsagents in any role, be it in an newsagent association or some other service organisation, ought to consider these results when planning their activity.

Note: the graph shows the average ranking achieved. The higher the ranking the less interested the responders are in the ANF engaging in this activity.

Anyone wanting a file of all survey responses should email me. The data does not identify individuals so there is no break of privacy. I make this data offer because too often headline results of surveys are used with little transparency of all voting. I will share all voting with anyone who wants it.

Click on the image for a larger version.

17 likes
Newsagency challenges

ANF responds to questions on Hubbed

Adam Joy, COO of the ANF, has responded to an email I sent him about correspondence relating to Hubbed he sent to a newsagent re Hubbed. In that correspondence Adam inferred that I was on the ANF board when to chose to go with Bill Express. I was not on the board then. I emailed Adam inviting him to revise what he had written. I also asked some questions about Hubbed.

Click here to see a response from the ANF to questions and my complaint about their letter to a newsagent.  I’ll post my original email to Adam as a comment to this post.

Here is the response I sent yesterday to Adam’s letter. This response needs to be read in-conjunction with Adam’s letter.

Adam,

Thanks for responding to my email.

You have inferred that I was on the ANF Board when the Bill Express decision was made. I was not. In fact, I joined months later. You need to advise who you have put about this mis-representation to.

In your letter you refer very selectively to the minutes of several ANF Board Meetings where Bill Express was discussed and use to build a narrative supporting your apparent claim that I supported Bill Express. The minutes in my year on the board were an inadequate representation of three days of meetings. Also, these minutes do not cover Executive Meeting discussions and other discussions. My position on Bill Express then and now is on the public record – a record which is counter to the narrative you have sought to pitch. You need to withdraw what you have written.

Now I will turn to the questions I raised and your response. For ease of comparison I will use the same numbering but not repeat my question or your response.

  1. I see no evidence of what I would call reasonable due diligence in your answer. You should have financial models at the core of this so newsagents can see the full costs and full opportunities. Your response does not indicate a rigorous process.
  2. The only business plan that matters to newsagents is their business plan. I would have expected the ANF to create business plans for each Hubbed offer so newsagents can see how it can play out.
  3. You say you have conducted retailed research on bill payment yet you have not published this. It would be useful to the ANF case that you publish this along with details of the newsagents you have worked with over the last six months on this issue. If your process is sound then the evidence will boost newsagent confidence.
  4. The ANF should have this information. You suggest its similar to a Point of Sale provider. No, it is not similar. Here, the ANF is a promoter. The obligation on the ANF is considerable yet to fails so far to step up. In terms of Point of Sale, each item in a package – which can be leased through any bank, finance company or other party – can be priced back to the individual item. With Hubbed this is not the case for some of the items. This is core due diligence the ANF ought to have undertaken for newsagents.
  5. I am told that newsagents querying what happens to Hubbed Premium hardware if they decide to not continue then Hubbed will find another location. I would have expected the ANF to require this to be covered in the contract and further that the lease for the equipment and the Hubbed business itself are one in the same.
  6. Yes there appear to be three different agreements. My view is that there should be one agreement so as to avoid a core issue with the Bill Express model. Further, I would have expected that thorough due diligence would have required that this be the case.
  7. Thanks for the response but I would have liked to see more detail.
  8. I am not challenging the integrity of anyone, just asking a question that needs to be asked. Attacking the question is unhelpful as it detracts from your answer.
  9. I would gave expected the ANF to be paid for the considerable amount of marketing support provided in your various media platforms and the time invested by your staff in promoting Hubbed to newsagents. I am not involved in any company operating in the space occupied by Hubbed.
  10. I have seen no information provided to demonstrate experience from the people behind Hubbed in the launch and running of a start up business in the consumer-facing services business at the core of the Hubbed offer.

I am happy to discuss Hubbed face to face. A public forum would be appropriate to demonstrate transparency. If the Hubbed model is good as you say it is newsagents will see that and embrace it. Your responses to my questions do not provide the detail and comfort I was seeking.

The ANF and Hubbed appear to not like being asked questions or challenged. If the offer is genuinely good and if the ANF has undertaken thorough due diligence on behalf of its members thorough scrutiny ought to be welcomed and result of good member up-take.

21 likes
Hubbed

Bang! Halloween off to an excellent start

Halloween sales in the first day and a half we have the stock up have been excellent making us wonder if we have enough stock for the season of fun!

We have Halloween products on the lease line. This placement is bringing new traffic in for us. These shoppers buying on impulse get a discount voucher and are encouraged by this to buy more. Halloween is a perfect season for leveraging discount vouchers to drive a more valuable per-visit spend.

5 likes
Newsagency opportunities

Tatts iPhone App to challenge retail lottery sales

The Tatts iPhone, available free from iTunes, is set to facilitate lottery product sales that would otherwise have been completed in a newsagency or some other lottery outlet.

I downloaded the App to try it out. I was surprised they are transacting by location. I am guessing their various agreements require this.  OzLotteries has no such barrier – you can by from any web enabled device anywhere in the world. The barrier aside, the app makes purchasing easy – more convenient than walking or driving to the store for a ticket.

You can get more information on the Tatts app from the iTunes store.

Newsagents facing a Tatts corporate image fit need to consider the App and online moved by tatts and their partners when budgeting for the capital investment.  While the pressure from tatts is considerable re corporate image, there is an opportunity to make a case in an appropriate forum for capital investment that respects the further opening of channels outside the traditional retail channels used for lottery products in the past.

Blindly investing in a corporate image fit without crunching the numbers and considering these mobile and online moved could lead to a bad investment.

16 likes
Lotteries

Discounted crossword magazine titles

I was in Cairns yesterday and noticed this display if discounted crossword titles at the newsagency at the airport. This offer of Puzzler titles mirrors the Bauer discount magazine deals that are prevalent in transit newsagency locations.

While the publisher argument will be that selling on price gets shoppers buying more, I see it as the publisher not backing better content than competitor products and that they are out of ideas for improving the product.

I can understand a few cents difference in cover price but some of these bagged and bundled magazine deals are so steep they educate the shopper to not pay full price for these titres elsewhere and, I suggest, therefore not value these titles as they once would.

5 likes
magazines

Excellent book on shopper loyalty programs

I’ve just read Scoring Points by Clive Humby, Terry Hunt and Tim Phillips, the definitive book on retail shopper loyalty programs.  Scoring Points chronicles the introducation and finessing of the loyalty program at UK supermarket giant Tesco. I’d recommend this book to any retailer considering loyalty programs and how they might use them in their business. While written from the perspective of a big retailer, this book is just as relevant at our end of town.

While I must prefer the discount vouchers approach to loyalty, this book is about the broader shopper loyalty focus and how it’s vital every retailer play in this space.

3 likes
Newsagency management

Newsagency theft story timely

Newsagents ought to read the story from The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday about the newsagency employee caught stealing more than $400 a day.

While it’s good to read about a conviction my work with newsagents tells me that only a fraction of theft in newsagencies is detected. here’s a reminder of what I wrote on employee theft last year:

Management tip: How to reduce employee theft in your newsagency
Retailers too often struggle with cutting the cost of employee and customer theft. They ignore opportunities to block theft and turn their backs on understanding the cost in their business.

Here is best practice advice which, if followed, will reduce the cost of theft in any retail business.

  1. Establish a theft policy and stick to it.  See below.
  2. Check references of prospective employees.
  3. Ask candidates if they would agree to a background check.
  4. Only sell what you arrive, bring into the store, through Point of Sale software. If you track it you can know if it has been stolen or not. If you do not track it who knows if it is stolen. [Most often businesses I work with to resolve theft issues would have found it sooner had they been doing this.]
  5. Track ALL sales – by scanning, touch screen button or PLU (product look up code), a hot key on your computer screen.
  6. Stop all department sales, sales where the employee gets to enter the amount of the item.
  7. Scan out ALL returns, products which are returned to suppliers.
  8. Undertake regular spot stock take throughout the business. The discrepancy between what you have and what the system has reflects theft.
  9. Reorder stock using your retail management software. This stops poor buying decisions. It also identified stock theft and employee fraud around stock.
  10. Use employee initials, codes or bar codes against each sale. Yes, this adds time to each sale. The benefits far outweigh the time cost.
  11. Set an end of shift balance target of $5.00. Many retailers achieve this – it takes discipline.
  12. Change your system passwords regularly. Make it a condition of employment that these passwords are never shared.
  13. Do random, during the day, register balance checks. Check that the cash your computer system thinks should be in the cash drawer is what is actually in the cash drawer.
  14. Use your software to check and report on behavior which could indicate employee theft.
  15. Follow your suspicions regardless. Put your business ahead of friendships..

The cost to any retail business of customer and employee theft can be significantly reduced. The keys are retail owner and management engagement, full use of the software and relentless application of a zero tolerance approach.

Here is a suggested THEFT POLICY for employees to read and sign.

  1. Theft, any theft, is a crime against this business, its owners, employees and others who rely on us for their income.
  2. If you discover any evidence or have any suspicion of theft, please report it to the business owner or most senior manager possible immediately. Doing so could save a considerable cost to the business.
  3. We have a zero tolerance policy on theft. All claims will be reported to law enforcement authorities for their investigation.
  4. From time to time we have the business under discrete surveillance in an effort to reduce theft. This may mean that you are photographed or recorded in some other way. By working here you accept this as a condition of employment.
  5. New employees are to provide permission for a police check prior to commencement of employment.
  6. Cash is never to be left unattended outside the cash drawer or a safe within the business.
  7. Credit and banking card payments are not to be accepted unless the physical card is presented and all required processes are followed for processing these.
  8. Employees caught stealing with irrefutable evidence face immediate dismissal to the extent permitted by local labour laws.
  9. Employees are not permitted to remove inventory from the store without permission.
  10. Employees are not permitted to provide a refund to a customer without appropriate management permission.
  11. Employees are not permitted to complete their own sales.
  12. Every dollar stolen from the business by customers and or employees can cost us up to four dollars to recover. This is why vigilance on theft is mission critical for our retail store.

Take theft seriously.

11 likes
Newsagency management

Using tents to attract newsagency shoppers

We’re promoting tents at the front of the newsagency for the last week of the school holidays to pitch our shop to kids and people shopping with kids. This teepee is one of three designs we have accessed to broaden our range of kids gifts in the run up to Christmas.

We’re the only retailer with this range in our centre. We’re excited to see how it performs.

Making moves like this is important as we have to attract our more shopper traffic from our own efforts rather than relying on attracting shoppers with products available in other retailers nearby. What we place at the front of our newsagencies is vital to pulling people off the street or in from the mall. It’s up to us.

2 likes
Gifts

Another discounted Bauer magazine pack challenging newsagency space

The space needed for the two different copies of Gourmet Traveller Wine magazine from Bauer is challenging newsagencies. The discounted pack takes extra space in already full magazine departments. While supermarkets expect the publisher to fund extra space, newsagents are left to shuffle products around or not display it at all.

This is a space, labour and cash-flow challenge that disadvantages newsagents.

5 likes
Magazine oversupply

What issues do newsagents think the ANF should work on?

I have created a single-question survey providing newsagents an opportunity to rank what they think the ANF should work on. I’ll leave the survey open for a few days. To participate in the survey please click here. FYI the survey software allows one response per computer. Also, the survey software randomises the 17 options for each respondent – your survey questions will be in a different sequence to others.

Note – the ranking is dynamic. Each time you make a selection next to a number the list changes. Click DONE when you are done.

13 likes
Newsagency management

Megan Gale promoting newsagents

It’s great to see Megan Gale supporting newsagents and the Astro Diaries that we have available exclusively through our channel (from Universal Magazines). As I blogged last month, these diaries came with billing delayed for the entire on-sale period.

Megan Gale’s support of us to her 90,000+ Twitter followers is on the back of other excellent traction for this product and the newsagency channel.

The supply model followed by Universal – giving newsagents more control over supply and terms that serve the sales cycle of the product – is one other publishers could follow.

3 likes
Diaries

The AFL promotes newsagents via Twitter

It’s great to see the AFL promoting newsagents to its 185,000+ Twitter followers with this tweet pitching the Hawks Official Premiers magazine. Any tweet directly promoting newsagents as go-to retailers for a product is welcome! This one from the AFL is especially welcome in AFL loving Victoria.

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magazines

Serving AFL fans

We’re promoting Hawks Premiers 2013 with newspapers and in this impulse purchase location on the way to the counter. We received a ton of stock and will give it several weeks to perform before we pull back. There has been a shift in the viable shelf life of titles like this. Years ago you’d carry them for weeks. Not today. Rent, labour and buying patterns have considerably cut their viable life for us.

3 likes
magazines

Oversupply of AWW royal baby one-shot

We have been grossly oversupplied with the AWW royal baby one-shot out today. Not just in my newsagencies but in several I spoke with – too much stock based on any reasonable assessment of what sells in these businesses including sales of AWW itself.

The title is also late to market with other royal baby one shots how and grabbing sales for weeks now.

Newsagents are also frustrated at the last day of the month issue.

Despite gross oversupply, we are giving this title support with display at the entrance to our magazine department. We’re giving it until Thursday. If we see no uptake by then we’re sending everything back.

Bauer should give us the ability to set our own supply rather than lumbering us with 40 or more copies that will never sell.

5 likes
Magazine oversupply

Taking a closer look at the Australia Post bill-payment parcel-post kiosks

Newsagents looking at getting into bill payment or parcel sending should visit an Australia Post corporate store and use one of their next-generation self-serve kiosks. They are easy to use – even for people who are not comfortable with technology.

These kiosks mirror the experience of kiosks in supermarkets, making them easier to understand and less intimidating. They are very different to the kiosks being proposed to newsagents by Hubbed. Whereas these Australia Post kiosks are completely self-service, the Hubbed kiosk required the customer to engage at the main counter from what I understand.

At an Australia Post kiosk you can scan your bill and complete the payment with cash or a card right there. The same with sending a parcel. No human interaction is required.

It’s clear Australia Post has developed these kiosks to address customer flow, to free their staff of work they don’t need to do whereas the Hubbed offer as it currently sits does not address this.

The kiosks in the photo are near one of my newsagencies. I’ve watched people using them several times now. Based on what I have seen at the kiosks and the reduced line for the main counter in this Australia Post outlet I’d say the kiosks are a game changer.

Click on the image for a larger version.

8 likes
Australia Post

Coles in Hawthorn shows local businesses how to connect with the local community

The Coles supermarket in Glenferrie Road in Hawthorn has for weeks of the AFL finals shown a local connection better than many small businesses on the strip. In addition to this window with the team’s colours, through the store and at the other entrance they were supporting the local team. This national retailer trumped many local retailers in promoting a local connection. Good on them.

3 likes
marketing

Sunday newsagency marketing tip: educate your customers

Products in a typical newsagency offer excellent customer education opportunities. Leverage these by running an in-store education event with a local expert and get better known as the go to retailer for these items.

Consider an education day or evening on these topics:

  1. Knitting.
  2. Quilting.
  3. Papercraft.
  4. Balloon displays.
  5. Dog or cat care.
  6. Fine dining in your home.
  7. Spring garden tips.
  8. Better handwriting.
  9. Choosing perfect words for your cards.
  10. Hair styling tips.
  11. How to make your wedding memorable in a good way.
  12. The best travel destinations.
  13. Learn how to di Sudoku and make your brain healthier.
  14. Understanding tattoo art.

This list is just a start. I have suggested topics for which you could enlist support from a local business to help run and promote your training. I am sure that appropriate suppliers could connect with you on this project too.

The right education event promoted well enough in advance should introduce your business to new customers. It should also broaden your network of business contacts.

I’d suggest you plan the education sessions in advance and consider one a quarter in the first year. Maybe host two in a day. One in the afternoon and one in the evening. At least give people timing options.  Keep the session brief and if space is an issue hand out tickets.  Have giveaways and handouts. Make it worth the while of those who attend.

Every newsagency could offer educational events.

6 likes
marketing

Sunday newsagency management tip: take control of your magazines

Magazine supply is regarded by newsagents in Australia as the single most important issue to resolve yet many newsagents to not use the tools at their disposal to take on the challenge.

Good newsagency software offers magazine management reports covering:

  • Magazine Sell Through Rates.
  • Supplier Performance Comparison.
  • Magazine Cash-Flow Performance.
  • Non-Performing Titles.
  • MPA Magazine Performance Tracking.

These reports and others arm newsagents with evidence of magazine oversupply and undersupply yet newsagents rarely reach for the reports when they complain about magazine supply. Instead, they rely on a cash-flow challenge indicating the problem or they rely on the work they see on the mornings of processing magazines into the business.

By not relying on magazine oversupply and undersupply evidence newsagents are not resourced to put their case and this, I think, is one reason nothing has been done about the treatment of newsagents in relation to magazine supply for decades.

Ignorance among newsagents and associations facilitates magazine oversupply and undersupply.

No association or newsagent has used reliable data to make the case in an appropriate forum to my knowledge. Why? Because they are ignorant or they think it’s too hard or both.

Any newsagent running good newsagency software can, in next to no time, document the fairness of supply of magazines to their business. This documentation could be invaluable in making a case to an appropriate forum through which real change could be required of any offending magazine distributor.

Taking action on magazine supply begins with newsagents using accurate data from their business. Individual newsagents and the channel more widely must treat this as a management issue if they want it resolved.

4 likes
magazine distribution

Calendars a good use of magazine fixtures

I’m helping a newsagency reconfigure their floor space and until they can get a mini-shop fit done they have been using old magazine fixtures to sell calendars. Calendar sales for September are more than double what they achieved for September in 2012.  This works even better if you can locate calendars near the appropriate category of magazines for the calendar subject.

2 likes
Calendars
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