I am disappointed that the Victorian Government is promoting 7-Eleven in their latest Myki TV commercials. 7-Eleven is the retail brand they name yet the vision is of the side wall of an old newsagency. This TVC was an excellent opportunity for the state government to show that it is serious about supporting small business.
Plenty of newsagents were among the tobacco retailers protesting in Brussels yesterday about the Tobacco Products Directive.
It is interesting to see the public protect approach by the aggrieved retailers. The health issues aside, it’s good to see the retailers making their complaints public.
Check out where I noticed the Darrell Lea Australia Day Rock Lea Road product at one Woolworths yesterday … yeah, the sale rack at the back of the shop. I though of this given the comments on my earlier post on this.
This store had a big Australia Day display on fixtures elsewhere in-store. Maybe the DL stock moved quickly and this was all they had left. Either way, it’s not a good look given that Australia day is a few days off yet.
Following my post last week about OK! moving to a Monday on-sale, a couple of people who I’d expect to know about such things have advised that they expect Friday magazine deliveries to have ceased altogether within six months.
This will create a challenge for filling missed deliveries and other orders in a timely manner. Friday is a good catch up day for weekend trade opportunities.
This photo shows part of our Valentine’s Day display in one of my newsagencies. The table runs back two and a half metres and is stacked with a broad range of plush for all sorts of Valentine’s Day gift giving occasions.
The display has been up just a few days and already sales are strong. This is in part due to the success we had through Christmas with the large Beanie Balls. We know they sell in our area so we are riding off the back of that knowledge with our choice of the ladybug Beanie Ball as our hero product for Valentine’s Day this year.
I have high hopes for Valentine’s Day for card and gift sales. Right now, our focus is on the gifts. While our cards are out, they are not at the lease line, facing into the mall, as the plush display is.
We have the display unit promoting Puzzler and Bauer crossword titles located just inside the entrance, appropriately next to our glasses unit. While only in place a short time, we are certain this unit is driving sales of the promoted titles.
We are rich in traffic in newsagencies and sometimes the best way to drive sales growth it to promote products outside the usual location for those products. That’s certainly working here for us.
I like the stand. It uses a small footprint, is easy to move and holds a good range of product.
Zinio, the digital magazine newsstand, is offering $50 of free access to magazines to get more people using the platform. This will buy around 18 single issues of magazines. It’s a great (for Zinio and the publishers) way to get consumers trying the platform. Life Hacker has the story.
Jamie Oliver launched his new YouTube food channel Monday. Called Food Tube, the channel provides a platform of direct to consumer contact for Oliver. It’s a move that demonstrates further disruption for the television networks and underscores disruption everyone involved in media production an distribution can expect. Read more here.
1.8 billion servings of Coke beverages are severed every day in more than 200 countries. Beyond being the most widely consumed beverage brand, it is the best known brand, the world over. Beyond the beverages, Coke is a brand that is loved. Indeed, love and happiness are brand goals for Coke the world over.
I was fortunate to hear Melvin Landis, Chief Retail Sales Office for Coca-Cola and Alison Lewis, senior Vice President, North America, for Coca-Cola speak at the National Retail Federation Big Ideas Show in New York last week.
The keynote presentations focused on how Coke positively promotes its various sub brands and connects these with happiness and how Coke helps retailers leverage the message of happiness and drive sales. From large businesses to small, Coke has an integrated campaign from the product through paid advertising, using social media and plenty of in-store activity to help retailers like newsagents drive sales.
Here are some of the (unedited) notes I took during the presentations:
Here are some key points about the value of the Coke brand and its connection with today’s consumer:
Their targeting of millennial consumers was a surprise. I had not seen (realised) this myself and was enthralled by their pitch and their understanding of the millennial consumer.
The Coke message showed the importance of going beyond a one-off in-store offer and developing a long-term fully integrated offer that harvests shopper data, drives long-term impulse purchases and uses the main brand and a host of sub brands to attract shoppers who might otherwise not have visited the business. This is actually massive – using a beverage story to drive traffic.
Too often promotions are run in newsagencies that leech off existing traffic. While that’s okay, it is not good for the long-term growth of our businesses. we need more campaigns, products and supplier relationships that drive new traffic.
The Coke supplier / newsagent relationship is two-way, tapping into the global resources of the company. It is built around growing the newsagency business and not just seeking to drive volume of one or two beverage products over a short / medium term campaign.
To finish, here is a video of a Coke campaign in Singapore. It reflects the type of emotional connection around optimism and happiness that the company so often embraces in its consumer campaigns.
I used to think of Coke as a sugary syrupy drink that was not necessarily good for health. The reality is that in the family of products Coke offers plenty of healthy choices … all promoted through the same prism of optimism and happiness.
The team at one of my stores created a timely back to School themed counter promotion of Australian iPad for Education.
The timely nature of the title and the free iPad cover lead me to expect good impulse purchases at this sales counter location. We also have the title with our technology magazines.
My plan is to move this counter display to weeklies after a week and that’s where plenty of mums spend browsing time.
Feast magazine is a true special interest magazine. It’s the kind of title that is likely to drive shopper returns to the business. I say this based on direct customer feedback. Once they know you have the title you will be their Feast outlet.
This is why I liken it to frankie a title with similar customer loyalty, an equally valuable title for us. While Feast is in supermarkets, it’s our featuring of the title that makes it work better for us.
Check out the Darrell Lea Australia Day floor display unit on show at my local Woolworths supermarket yesterday.
I like the striking design of the unit, excellent for visual cut-through and perfect for placement next to the Australia Day display as it was. I also like the pitch: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE! YUM, YUM, YUM! Very nice.
The Proudly Australian owned and operated pitch is also a strong message.
I’d be interested to know if newsagents selling darrell Lea have this display unit or were offered it.
I like the Australia Day themed cover and giveaway with the current issue of Take 5 magazine. This is a nice connection with the day. We gave it a push with additional pockets for display, ensuring that the free bag was on show for shoppers to see.
We are promoting the latest issue of Men’s Health magazine with this aisle-end display in the men’s area of our magazine department.
With summer in full swing and attention focused, for the Men’s Health target customer, on looking good and getting fitter for the year ahead, promotion of this issue is most timely.
Some newsagents reported that they have not received all of their electronic invoices form Gordon and Gotch for tomorrow. I alerted the company and their Head of IT has just advised that Gotch has re-sent DD2 files to newsagents who had the problem. They should be available now. This applies to all newsagents who had not received all their files regardless of computer system.
Pubs and bars have happy hours, when they discount some products to attract patrons at certain times, why not newsagents?
I know there are some newsagents who do deals on a quiet day of the week, usually Tuesday, but I am not aware of anyone running a genuine happy hour. If you are please share here.
We don’t run a happy hour in any of my stores but I am thinking about it. As I see it, we’d need: a compelling deal, collateral to promote the happy hour, a flashing light or some other device to draw attention and shop floor staff engagement.
For the compelling deal I am thinking about offers like:
Given traffic in the centres in which my stores are located I’d probably run Happy Hour between 1pm and 3pm on a Tuesday. I’d try it for a month and then assess performance.
Training is vital to improving the value of employees to a business and the business to them. One way to show your commitment is to post details of training completed in a noticeboard in the back room or office.
You could list formal education undertaken as well as less formal training such as workshops hosted by suppliers and your software company. Such a public display could encourage others to seek out training.
My Tower Systems newsagency software company hosts regular training workshops every week. Plus, the company has an extensive video training library that can be accessed from anywhere. This type of training could be a star – it’s free and accessible.
Here is a list of the upcoming one hour online live training workshops. More will be added as most are booked out:
This is part of the food-to-go offering in a Duane Reade ‘drug store’ (convenience store) in Manhattan, near Times Square. I’m posting it because I know of many newsagents with convenience models and others with plans in this retail niche.
While the daily foot traffic in front of this particular location is more than most of us see in a week or two, the range is nevertheless interesting. I like the variety from fruit to sandwiches to salads to water. The food looks delicious. It is packaged and displayed to drive sales. I have seen that a lot with food in the US. Whereas in Australia prepackaged sandwiches are often displayed to fit in a refrigerated unit, displays I have seen in the last two weeks follow more professional visual merchandising display principles.
Outside of the shot of the photo is a terrific range of sushi.
Click on the image for a larger version.
What we are seeing here is a big business approach that any c-store small business could copy in the context of their space and situation.
With the move of OK! magazine from a Friday to a Monday for Eastern Seaboard newsagents begs the question of the future of Friday deliveries.
I wish we received more of our weeklies on Fridays as this would help drive weekend traffic. Weekends bring us new and often non-local shoppers. That said, I understand the importance of the Monday traffic for so many other newsagents.
In WA, SA/NT & Far North Queensland the move is from a Monday delivery to a Wednesday delivery.
I thought this display of lower volume newspaper products was interesting. While not as efficient as the acrylic floor unit we use, the masthead is on show and accessing the titles is easy. The only downside is that it’s a permanent fixture, not easily moved or changed.
Godiva has a terrific Valentine’s Day window in each of its retail outlets. I have seen it several times. The window display acts as a billboard not only for each store but for the brand overall. Once you have seen it several times it is well registered in your mind.
Imagine the shopper connection we could drive if every newsagency had exactly the same window display setup for a major season. Yes, I understand this is not what small business is about. However, our national spread is an asset we are not leveraging to our advantage.
Check out the window display at one of the Swatch shops in New York pitching watches as a Valentine’s Day gifts.
In many retail outlets this trip I have seen items promoted as Valentine’s Day gifts that I would not think of for this occasion. The same for cards with captions targeting more than a traditional love recipient, driving the giving of multiple Valentine’s Day cards. From a retail business perspective this is good to see.
Here is permanent outpost located in a shopping mall promoting electronic cigarettes. I am posting this not to promote the product but to show how mainstream e-cigarettes are becoming in the US. Some people I spoke with told me that patrons in bars and other indoors venues were permitted to smoke these.
What I am noticing with electronic cigarettes is the names. Like Brilliant Smoke. Fascinating.
This a-frame sign is out the front of a tobacco shop on Seventh Avenue in New York. It shows that electronic cigarettes are just another product to them, reinforcing my recent observations that they are becoming mainstream.
It will be interesting watch moves in Australia over the next few months as several manufacturers have told me they are working on Australian distribution.
TechCrunch is reporting that Apple will provide access to digital editional of Hearst magazine titles days before the print editions are out.
This is a big move, one that makes the print edition a second class citizen to the digital edition. It is a move that makes sense for Apple, the publisher and the digital consumer yet one I wish was not being made.
After a relatively quiet year on the digital front for magazines maybe 2013 will see more activity.
This move will, no doubt, be considered by some newsagents as they consider space allocation for magazines.