With the pace and extent of changes in retail – how, why, when and where people shop and what they purchase – today more than ever we need to focus on delivering a compelling reason for people to shop with us.
For newsagents, the most compelling reason for people to shop with you is location. You’re local and have what they want at a price they can justify. (If it is not location what is it?)
My question is, how well do your leverage your location?
Too often, newsagents want to look like capital city retailers, chasing a me-too model. This is not a plan, it is not leveraging what is probably most unique to your business – your location.
So, how local is your business. How connected is your range to the local community? How connected is the business to the local community?
The way to test this is to ask yourself – what if an international chain opened a corporate newsagency next to yours and offered the tradition range of newsagency products – would they take customers from you?
You could say probably not because shoppers like you and your staff?
Okay, what if they dropped their prices slightly or did something else to separate their business from yours? Would they take customers from you? Probably some.
You may comfort yourself that an overseas business is not going to open a newsagency next to yours to take your customers. I’d agree with that. However, it is happening today. Supermarkets, convenience stores, petrol outlets … they are all doing this, eating away at your business, offering something else you don’t offer.
That newsagencies are losing business to supermarkets, convenience stores, petrol outlets is a problem we are not addressing as a channel. Hell we are, for the most part, ignoring it. I think we can address it by being more locally focused, by serving the local community better, by ensuring that they see, understand and feel our local connection – in a way supermarkets, convenience stores, petrol outlets cannot make the local connection.
This is not easy stuff for newsagents to think about or respond to but respond we must. We must address the complex and relentless areas of competition – that we see and that we don’t – as well as the changes in retail. we do this by making more valuable and compelling businesses which serve shoppers in our own backyard.
How seriously local is your business?
This display of a selection of our car / motoring magazine titles faces newspaper shoppers as they turn from the newspaper stand to head to the counter. We created the simple display on the weekend as part of a series of moves to promote magazines outside of their usual location.
