We take care with our magazine adjacencies. This placement of vegetarian titles is a good example. By taking care to get common niche titles next to each other we tend to drive multiple purchases from the same niche.
It can be a challenge to get this done when putting magazines out – so we run through the department later in the day, tweaking placement solely to drive multiple title purchases.
We are have been promoting the Pacific Magazines Win a holiday in Fiji competition this week with this display at the counter. I love these displays by the team at the counter around a single promotion or theme. It drives shopper engagement and connects us well with the prize on offer – in this case the Fiji holiday.
We love promoting great competitions as it reinforces a a good value proposition.
We have been promoting the latest issue of Dolly magazine (and the free nail kit) with this aisle end display plus a waterfall placement in the usual location for the title. Both allocations will run for the first week of the on-sale.
In week two we will pull back to the waterfall and maybe a promotion elsewhere space permitting.
Days into his presidency, early in 2009 US President Barack Obama signed into a massive tax hike on tobacco. The result is a historic reduction in people smoking. George Bush twice rejected a tax hike on tobacco. The cost to the health system and lives as a result of the lack of a tax hike years is immeasurable.
It is data like this that will spur governments to adopt the Australian plain packaging laws and other measures on tobacco product sales.
Regardless of your position on tobacco, newsagents who sell tobacco need to think about exiting the category. It’s in decline. This will increase on the back of the amazing US result announced a few days ago and the expected result of plain packaging here. There will come a time when tobacco products are not paying their way – for the space and labour the require.
I quit the category in 1999 when our sales were around $1,500 a week. We didn’t skip a beat.
Beyond the issue of social responsibility is the matter of business performance. With governments around the world closing in on big tobacco there is little upside for retailers, especially when there are many other uses for time, space and capital.
I expect hundreds of newsagents will get to the Reed Gift Fair in Sydney this weekend – if previous years are anything to go by. My sense is that newsagent attendance is up each year by more than 10% as the channel looks for new products to offer in-store. It’s well worth checking out if you can get there … I’d even say mandatory for newsagents who have never been.
Newsagent suppliers – and I know there are plenty who read this blog – should support newsagents by making a submission to the Senate Committee considering Nick Xenophon’s private member’s bill seeking to establish a fairer penalty rate regime for small businesses including newsagents. Read more about this here and here to see an email from Nick Xenophon on this.
If penalty rates for weekend hours were reduced entrepreneurial newsagents would employ more staff and increase sales on the weekend. Suppliers wold benefit from this.
So, if you are a supplier, please support the cause.
We have put our initial range of 2013 diaries on the wall, next to stationery. This move to the wall has been driven by the demand for floor space and as part of our process of locating key product categories in permanent and well-signposted homes in-store. The wall placement of diaries also helps us present the diary range in a more structured and co-ordinated way – in keeping with the approach taken by our corporate competitors in the diary space.
I have received several emails over the last couple of days querying why we are promoting Smith Journal so prominently. The answer is simple: it sells well. Our sales so far are: 15, 17 and 13 – for issues #1, #2 and #3. It is popular with guys browsing the store. This is especially valuable since converting a browser into a shopper is vital to the newsagency retail model. Given the men’s magazines our channel sells, newsagents should be doing well with this title. The key is to let shoppers know you have it – this is what category specialists do..
I am here in Denver for the Shop.org Annual Summit. The first two days have been excellent and the last looks just as good. While this is essentially a conference about retail and technology – mobile, social, Internet – it is, at its heart, a conference about retail today and into the future.
It has been interesting listening to speakers talk about the challenge of online retailers and the threat many think they pose to high street retail and how high street is in the better position because of a range of undeniable economic factors (which I won’t go into here) yet high street retailers worry to the point of harming their own businesses. This thread is particularly interesting given the challenges newsagents face: disruption around plenty of what we sell, fundamental restructuring of key parts of our businesses and inability to leverage our biggest asset.
This conference reinforces for me the extent of change taking place in and around retail and the need for everyone involved in retail to have a plan for embracing navigating and change. Change goes beyond what we know today. Just one stat which is mind-boggling: 10% of sales achieved by UK retailer Marks & Spencer are done online. This is a business that was technologically in the dark ages just a few years ago. M&S are entering new countries without opening stores. Nordstrom, a US department store with US$10B+ in sales and more than 200 stores is achieving excellent online growth.
While the stories gaining the most attention are from large retailers, my core interest is small and independent retailers. I attend these conferences to learn about opportunities for this sector – to help us compete in the changing world. As with so many things in business it comes back to customer service … but that’s a post for another day.
Check out the clever back to college window display I saw at an Apple store here in the US yesterday.
Click on the image to see the detail of how they place their product. Nice!
Like everything they do, this window display is clean, on-topic, eye-catching and focused on driving sales.
While we don’t sell these products, I take inspiration from the display.
I have been fortunate to see plenty of retail during a brief trip to Denver this week. In one store I saw a range of cards created especially for the election. They were pretty funny. The store owner said they were not selling that well because Americans get passionate about their politics. Hmm … given the lax gun control laws here I doubt I would send a card making fun of a politician.
The new line of comic-themed wrapping paper has been selling like hot cakes. While we have a pretty good range of wrap, this line is outselling all others easily. We are not promoting it in any special way – customers are finding it for themselves.
We’ve ordered more as based on demand this design will sell well for some time yet.
I must have missed the note about the rebranding of UFC magazine to UFC FIT. No matter, we are treating the magazine differently, now placing it with fitness titles as opposed to the usual placement with sports titles.
While this may not seem like a big move I know from watching shoppers that it will be noticed by different shoppers thanks to this move.
A court case between Visa, MasterCard and major banks in the US and retailers on excessive fees appeared a step closer to resolution with a $7.25B (yes, Billon) settlement proposal from the Visa, MasterCard et al. Peak retail body, The National Retail Federation, (not a party to the case) has come out today against the settlement. They say the proposed settlement does not progress the issue of ever-increasing fees imposed on retailers for the use of cards.
We face the same fee problem in Australia but worse. There is less competition for the provision of EFTPOS services. The government, through the Reserve Bank, put the banks and a couple of major retailers, effectively in charge of regulation.
Pushing back against unreasonable fees is something newsagents and other retailers should be working on through those who represent them. We should be looking carefully at the battle being waged in the US. Losing the percentage we lose of each card based sale for what are often mediocre services is unreasonable.
Darrell Lea resellers yesterday received a fax from the company outlining some changes. They have cut some products, changed trading terms and appointed a another company to handle distribution.
The reduction in product will leave the current Darrell Lea stands with spare space. Some of the cut lines will be missed y some retailers.
It’s the change in markdown policy that is causing the most concern. retailers accepted the low Darrell Lea margin because on a reasonable markdown policy. The policy is: no markdowns, credits, rebates or settlement discounts.
They say the new terms provide greater transparency. No they don’t. They say the new terms aim to build a stronger business relationship. No the don’t.
I suspect the changes will cause some retailers to quit stocking Darrell Lea and seek out an alternative.
The announcement provides no confidence of consultation with the people facing customers every day stocking and promoting the Darrell Lea product.
Over the years I have heard and seen some horror newsagency business acquisitions unfold: owners leaving immediately after settlement and not training the purchaser, the deletion of sales data leaving the new owner with nothing to guide business decisions, the cancelling of seasonal orders leaving the business without stock. The most recent story is more brutal.
The party purchasing the newsagency took reasonable steps to protect the business data following settlement. Someone, allegedly the former owner of the business entered the business and physically attacked the main computer in the business – cutting cables and damaging the hard drive. All very nasty for the new newsagents.
When we sell our newsagency businesses we have an obligation to sell based in accurate business data, to leave key business data in tact as it’s an asset of the business and to leave the running of the business to the new owners following settlement.
The business affected is moving on – but probably with a wariness thanks to this experience.
One of our team members noticed catalogue magazine in another newsagency and given our excellent sales for frankie magazine suggested we should carry this title. So we are.
We regularly look at out best selling titles and consider titles appealing to the same shopper we could bring in to drive sales efficiency.
We have been co-locating the key garden titles for the last week with the secondary location being with weeklies.
Our plan is to run this for at least two weeks – to connect with customers who are not regular gardening title purchasers. these spring themed issues are ideal for them.
For the last week we have been giving the new ACP title TECHlife some extra attention since the cover boasts that this issue has the world’s first magazine coverage of the new iPhone.
The pitch is a good reason to get the title in front of more people – and since the title is new every step counts to help it find followers.
Last week I sent a letter to all newsagents (through my newsagency software company) with information on handling some of the data merge and management aspects of T2020. It’ starts…
HOW NEWSAGENCY SOFTWARE HELPS NEWSAGENTS HANDLE T2020
Tower Systems has been helping newsagents merge distribution businesses for many years. This, and our work with South Australian newsagents through the Migration Project, the forerunner to T2020, has given us experience vital to helping newsagents with T2020.
Just as T2020 is about rationalising newspaper distribution businesses, it is also about driving efficiency at a range of points in the newsagency channel. We have already acquired the NewsPOS newsagency software business. Another is in negotiation.
Tower Systems is committed, I am committed, to delivering newsagents software to meet T2020 and other industry standards, providing a technology platform for driving newsagency business efficiency and profitability.
We are also committed to helping retail newsagents navigate change and create more valuable retail businesses.
We serve distribution businesses today delivering in excess of 10,000 newspapers and serving more than 160 sub agents … and have done for many years.
We can and will help newsagents step up to handling scale.
Yes, there are challenges in moving from a business with a few hundred customers to being part of a business with, maybe, 10,000 customers. Good technology is vital. We have people on our team and customers in our community who will help you face T2020.
Click here to access a copy of the letter. I wrote it to educate newsagents as well as to counter some mis information about the work involved in merging distribution data.
T2020 is about driving operational efficiency in pursuit of business performance. Investing time to get the optimum performance of delivery runs is time well invested.
Check out the display created by our team for issue #3 of Smith Journal magazine. This is in our men’s magazine section and will be easily noticed by everyone in this section of the business.
I love that our team sought to create a display that visually respects the cover of the magazine. It’s a display that will be noticed because it is different to the usual display for magazines. I love this display and the cover of the magazine.
We have this issue of Smith Journal in three locations: this display, the usual location for the title and pocket next to frankie.
We are promoting the launch issue of women’s fitness magazine from ACP with this aisle end display facing all shoppers entering the store.
We also have the magazine in prominent display in our women’s health and fitness section in store.
Newsagents – get behind this launch and leverage the $2M ACP is spending on launching this title.
The <em>iPad for Kids</em> magbook we got in last week is timely with devices like the iPad getting so much news coverage. We have it in our tech section as well as here, sitting above our display of weekly magazines. It’s not a title people will come in looking for so I wanted to get it in front of more shoppers – hence this placement.
Click on the image to see the complete photo.
We have been promoting the new AWW cookbook: Breakfast with newspapers for the last week, along with Donna Hay Kids. We need to promote the AWW cookbooks outside their usual location otherwise they take too long to sell and are cash flow negative for us given the scale out for each issue. So, we try and move them along by cycling them through several locations during the first month of the on-sale.
Gizmodo is reporting that Microsoft is about to open 32 holiday stores in the US to leverage what is called the holiday season. This is an interesting move on the back of some larger format Microsoft stores open in the US already. Forbes has identified Apple as the most successful retailer in the world: sales by space and sales by employee.
This move by the tech giant is no different to major fashion brands preferring their own outlets over department store sales. It comes back to brand control and leveraging this as their point of difference.
The photo is of a Microsoft store I visited today in Denver.