The ABC has launched it’s iPad app today. The Age has a good wrap up of what is on offer. It all looks pretty exciting – the various screen shots show that the app coveras a variety of ABC offers. That it’s free will see good early adoption.
While we will see plenty more announcements of local iPad apps with the product going on sale tomorrow, the ABC offer brings credibility to the decive as an alternative news, information and entertainment channel.
I am speaking at a series of workshops next month on How to create your Newsagency of the Future. After months of planning I am pleased to be finally able to announce the details of this important workshop series for newsagents.
The announcement is timely with the launch of the Apple iPad tomorrow since part of the workshop content will look at the likely impact of the iPad and similar technologies on the newsagency channel.
It is time for newsagents to look more carefully at the implications significant changes to the distribution channel which will affect newspapers and magazines.
The time is also right to discuss online strategies and how these may work for newsagents. Some newsagents are having tremendous success while others are wondering why they bothered.
I will share details from the latest newsagent benchmark study which tests the health of the newsagency channel as we currently know it.
I will also share case studies of newsagents who are transforming their businesses, attracting new traffic and selling better margin product. This will include sharing some secrets on how to get good knowledge on good margin product trends.
I promise a practical business-building session which will leave participants with change opportunities which can be implemented in almost any situation and with a better understanding of what the future may hold.
Access to the workshop is FREE and open to all newsagents. To book, please book online here or download the booking form here and fax this to the number noted.
While the workshop is funded by my software company, Tower Systems, it is NOT a sales pitch. I’m not out to sell you anything. What I want is a healthier and stronger newsagency channel, a channel with a bright future for newsagents, their employees, their suppliers and all of the families which rely on the newsagency channel for income.
I am happy to consider dates beyond those listed. Make contact with me direct if you and a group of newsagent colleagues would like a workshop hosted closer to your location.
The free pack of Uncle Tobys’ Oats in every copy of the latest issue of the Australian Women’s Weekly makes the magzines lop-sided and bent. The product does not look as good as it usually does as result. We had to hide some stock at the bottom of the stack it looked that bad. The other challenge is that we cannot create the usual high stack because they fall over. So, the usual display is not as impressive and we now have back room stock to manage.
While I am sure that the advertiser prefers the giveawar to be in the magazine, the magazine itself is suffering from the sample product.
We are promoting the latest issue of the Australian Women’s Weekly on one of our ACP basket builder stands at the entrance to our main women’s magazine aisle.
This display is also seen by everyone entering the shop and shoppers as they move from the newspaper stand to the counter. We are also promoting AWW on the rear of the stand – to shoppers as they leave the aisle. The magazine can be bought from both sides of the stand.
While it may not be obvious from the photo, we have invested a bit of time in the display, slicing up some of the posters to enable us to include the social responsibility pitch on each shelf of the display. We did this for visual effect as much as anything. The amount of blue in the display finishes it off well.
We are promoting the latest issue of That’s Life magazine out the front of the newsagency in the mall. The Deal or No Deal tie-in promotion is strong – we know this from past experience with similar promotions.
We have located the stand promoting That’s Life next to the entrance to our main lottery counter – both products should feed well off of each other.
We will leave this display up for the rest of this week. depending on sales we may use the stand for Better Homes & Gardens on the weekend.
Upstart (a magazine for emerging journalists) published a terrific profile on Melbourne’s ethnic press two weeks ago.
Regulars here would know I’m a fan of ethnic newspapers because of growing sales and their tremendously loyal customers. You can’t ignore double digit growth. I’d happily extend the raneg of ethnic titles in any oy my newsagencies.
Quietly, over the last few days one of team from Tower Systems has been playing, like a kid in a candy shop, with our Point of Sale software on the yet to launch Apple iPad. Using some smart technology we have been able to gain a good feel for the iPad as a management tool for newsagents in their businesses as well as when they are on the road away from their businesses.
We have found the iPad very easy to learn and navigate and the 10″ screen very easy on the eye.
So, outside of application for newspapers, maagzines, books and other digital content, the iPad has good uses in business. It’sa terrific tax deduction for newsagents who like gadgets with a good business use.
Disclosure: I am the owner of Tower Systems – serving more than 1,700 newsagents with newsagency management software.
Banking Day has a couple of excellent reports from yesterday and last week on the latest from the investigation into the collapse of the company being held in the Supreme Court of Victoria. Each day of the hearing has shown that newsagents were just a small part of a major financial scam.
Bill Express funded the entrepreneurial visions and dreams of its chief executive, Ian Christiansen and his late brother Hal Chistiansen, the Supreme Court of Victoria heard yesterday.
Profit results were created and funding was also provided to Australian Private Networks (a private company that now trades as Activ8Me, Australia’s largest satellite broadband provider) in a convoluted funding arrangement relying on cash from the “Arabian Highway”.
Click here for a free trial to Banking Day to get the rest of the article.
Once can’t help but wonder whether independent due diligence into Bill Express before it was promoted to newsagents would have uncovered the now obvious flaws in the business model. We will never know. No such due diligence was undertaken on behalf of newsagents.
Noticing the success we have been enjoying with ACPs Slow Cooker title, one of our team members ordered a few copies of the Slow Cooked mini cookbook. This is a terrific initiative. We have placed the title with the Slow Cooker title – chasing the impulse to the impulse.
The Sydney Morning Herald today reports that newsagents could be among others slugged $500 a year by the federal government as part of their crackdown on money laundering. The $500 fee and considerable compliance costs would apply to any Austrac registered business. This would snare newsagents offering Western Union services.
If the plan proceeds and newsagents are hit with the costs, I would expect many to opt out of Western Union. This would have significant income ramifications for the ANF.
We opted out of Western Union in my newsagencies last year following a cost benefit assessment and after taking on board the Austrac regulatory requirements. We figured that the offering the service was no longer worth it.
A cup of coffee and a newspaper looks set to be usurped by a latte and an iPad as the media of choice for Australia’s cafe set with the launch of the iPad on Friday.
Tens of thousands of the devices could be sold in the first year.
Where once magazines and papers ruled, research from Australia and overseas suggests iPads will quickly become a common sight in cafes that run Wi-Fi hotspots.
The opening paragraphs from a story in The Australian yesterday. In Cafe circuit braces for impact of Apple’s iPad, the newspaper touts the new device and the potential impact on reading habits. This story is one of many by the newspaper over the last couple of months talking up the iPad. They will be, after all, the first newspaper in Australia with an iPad app – just $4.99 a month.
iPad pre-sales, have been, I am told, well above expectations. That said, there is little in the way of local content to be available from launch this Friday. This is a surprise.
The iPad is an opportunity for publishers to innovate. Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, we are not seeing much of that at the moment.
Newsagents need to be engaged in conversations about the iPad and other disruptive products coming down the line. They will succeed, opening a new channel and attracting plenty of existing print customers.
How do you convey in a display that the pencils on display are made from recycled newspapers? While back office marketing people would create a poster to tell the story, out at newsXpress Knox, one of the team decided to use a rolled-up newspaper to tell the story. They rolled a newspaper and used this to cap a display promoting the OBON pencils. The display looks terrific. I’ve seen people drawn to it to find out what the newspaper has to do with pencils. Next to the packs of pencils are two loose pencils and a sharpener – so shoppers can actually see the newspaper.
An interactive display like this can work for many products we sell in newsagencies. Retail theatre is important to make products appealing and, in some cases, understandable.
Too often in newsagencies I see displays which were out of date twenty and thirty years ago. We need to innovate in our product presentation if we are to compete in today’s retail environment. After all, everything we sell is available elsewhere.
We are promoting recipes+ at the counter until Wednesday. Yesterday was lean in terms of titles which we’d promote at the counter so we decided to give a title a go which would rarely get the opportunity – hence the prime space for recipes+.
Wednesday looks set to be crazy based on the titles we knnow about. It’s alwasy the case on the last Wednesday of the month – the great cash grad newsagents call it.
A rumour 3AW’s Rumour File this morning about a free newspaper (Herald Sun?) for next Saturday has resulted in circulation people from the herald & Weekly Times doing the rounds of newsagencies to quell concerns. A few newsagents who contacted me heard about the rumour from H&WT people when they visited.
420 newsagents are now using the Tyro broadband eftpos solution. I am proud to say that Tower Systems has just over 300 of these with more joining each month. Tyro is ideal for newsagents because it is faster than a regular eftpos terminal, it is more accurate than a regular eftpos terminal and it costs less than a regular eftpos terminal.
Tyro really comes into its own in peak trading seasons like the recently completed Mother’s Day. Processing eftpos transactions was a breeze in my newsagencies because Tyro payments are done in a few seconds – a fraction of the time you wait for a bank terminal.
We are able to handle busier trading periods without the same employee ratio as in the past in part due to Tyro and the time it saves. This is where there is a real cost benefit to newsagents of Tyro over older technology bank terminals.
Disclosure: Through Tower Systems I have a commercial relationship with Tyro.
The Australian is reporting this morning that it has sold out of ads on its iPad app which is set to launch later this week. Advertising revenue is what will make or break this new channel. I suspect make. I know from my own order for an iPad that the queue to purchase the device here in Australia is considerable.
In addition to a terrific 2010 World Cup magazine and supporter product display at the front of the newsagency, the double in-location display with our sports titles on the weekend has worked well for us. While it was a challenge to find the space in the magazine fixtures, the results have made it worthwhile.
With World Cup title stock in short supply from distributors we are looking at what we can get from other newsagents. My sense is that we could see good sales rught up until the competition starts.
The Age ran a good story on page three yesterday about the iPad. The article was promoted on the front page of the newspaper. Such prominent placement demonstrates how they view the importance of the story. Newsagents should read it. Many newspaper publishers around the world have high hopes for the iPad and similar devices. The Age article included this about their plans:
The Age iPad app is expected to enable scrolling through the paper, calling up information panels on articles, jump-to navigation to various points in an edition, and the ability to share content through social media.
”The arrival of the iPad is an exciting opportunity for the media industry,” The Age’s editor-in-chief, Paul Ramadge, says. ”From what I’ve seen so far, readers of newspapers will enjoy the interactivity of this new format.”
Reading the comments at my recent post on flat retail sales got me thinking about practical ways newsagents could turnaround their retail businesses. I have put together a few ideas below which are a mix of basic business advice and out there crazy ideas. They are offered as thought starters.
If your newsagency sales are flat and you are doing the same things today that you have been doing for the last year it is not good enough.
Business will not come to you. You have to go out and find it – often through a series of small steps as opposed to a big bold move. You have to obsess about presenting a compelling offer to everyone walking through your door.
Different businesses are approaching the tough retail conditions differently. Take Myer. I heard CEO Bernie Brooks speaking the other day and he made it clear that they remain committed to their discount policy for now. Price appears to be working for them as a point of difference and while they don’t see it as ideal, that it is working in a tough market sees them sticking to is.
Price is not a point of difference option to newsagents – not across the board at least. Australian consumers expect us to be expensive. That has been shown in plenty of consumer surveys. Railing against this is a challenge. We can do this for some categories and at seasons but not across the board. Ink is a terrific example where we can promote on price – it is a key driver of the success we are having with that.
Other retailers focus on a unique range as their point of difference. The mix requirements of our shingle make that a challenge.
Here are some tips for newsagents on responding to flat sales:
Stop talking about it. Yes, retail is tough. Talking about will not improve your situation. Doing something is better than talk.
The ideas in this blog post are offered to get newsagents thinking of ideas which are appropriate to their businesses. It would be easy to dismiss them and say there is nothing new there. Maybe not. But what are you doing about tough times in your newsagency?
Change is oxygen to any retail business regardless of its current sales health. Doing nothing in tough times will make the tough times tougher for you.
Personally, I am optimistic about the future for newsagents. There are enough good operators who enjoy embracing change for the channel to have good prospects.
We sell more AFL footy cards on the weekend than any other time so we have moved our impulse stand for Men’s Health and placed it in front of part of our AFL collector cards display. Plenty of sales are to kids shopping with their dad. I am keen to see if this location for Men’s Health works better for us than with newspapers. The ideal would be to see a dad notice the magazine when buying footy cards for his kids, pick up the magazine and decide to purchase it as well. That’s the dream at least.
I am often asked about small moves like this and why I make them. If I want to be considered a magazine specialist then I have to act like one. That means working hard to seize every opportunity, large or small, to lure them in but also to get out from the magazine aisles and get to the people who aren’t shopping for magazines.
We are promoting APC magazine for a few days with an in-location display. It starts off our computer section – we are using the display as a beacon to that section of our men’s magazine aisle. APC sells well for us so we figured it’s a low hanging fruit opportunity for more sales. We plan to run the display until mid next week.
Computer titles are doing okay for us – they are in the top three categories in two of my newsagencies. This is due to giving them plenty of space and using the truly top selling titles to drive the category.
The News Limited newspaper home delivery account payment service is set to launch through newsagencies connected with Touch Networks through electronic payment platforms like eziPass.
While initially launching in South Australia, the technology being used by News will enable payments to be processed interstate should the project extend this far.
The newspaper home delivery model is changing on a range of fronts and newsagents with home delivery businesses need to take careful note of these changes as they modify their business plans.
Would you buy a car off the lot without fuel? When you buy a newsagency you can reasonably expect to be buying the business in its then existing form: shop fit, stock, customers. It is also reasonable that you expect to be buying information necessary to run the business. Information is the fuel of any good business.
This is on my mind today because of a newsagency which was sold recently where the new owner discovered that the sales history and other business data had been deleted, leaving nothing with which to compare the performance of the business or to guide business decisions.
The people buying the newsagency have been denied access to a key asset which they assumed was part of the purchase. Their job for the next year has been made more difficult. They have no sales history at all. They didn’t want confidential customer account data, just information necessary to properly manage the business.
The people selling the newsagency decided to delete crucial business data for their own reasons. They would have known the cost to the new owners of this data not being available. Their choice has hurt the business they called home for years.
My recommendation if you are buying a newsagency is that the sale contract includes a special condition along the lines of:
The seller agrees to not delete, remove or change in any sales, stock of customer history or data stored in the business computer system or manual records without the written permission of the purchaser.
While such a clause may be more onerous that some newsagency sellers would want, use it as a discussion point.
Industry associations should play a role here and ensure that the business settlement addresses this and other issues – especially since they have commercial relationships with newsagency brokers. The future of the channel depends on new people coming in. One way to ensure this is to offer some guidance around change of owner best practice.
When a newsagent sells their business they are selling the business as it operates. Data is crucial to business operation. Selling an operating newsagency without historical data is like selling a car without any fuel in the tank.
The miracle of the magazine distribution model saw our supply of Mindfood increased this month withour apparent justification. More stock, cash flow drain and more space to find. It is so frustrating when this happens. If I was paying on a scanned based trading model or if I was being paid for the use of my space I would not be as concerned.
This situation continues to happen because we permit it.
I got to hear Ross Greenwood on his Money News program on radio on Tuesday night. He was talking about consumer confidence and discussing this against the latest retail sales data.
It appears consumers are confident but not spending. Greenwood’s discussion was most interesting – and encouraging to retailers to look for answers.
It seems that every newsagent I talk with has the same answer when I ask them how business is. Flat is the common response. While a little digging uncovers some of the green shoots I talked about in the January – March newsagency sales benchmark study I blogged about, it is the overall feeling of flat trading which is concerning most.
We know from countless business gurus that sales are flat, the best response is to promote the business. This is what we are doing. We are actively promoting our newsagencies outside their four walls through professional flyers, posters around shopping centres and connecting with community groups.
In store, we are working harder than ever to make the offer look appealing, fresh and enjoyable. We are also brining in new lines to drive sales efficiency.
While we would be doing most of these things regardless of the current economic climate, we are doing them with greater commitment.
The areas of our newsagencies which are responding best to the external marketing and internal changes are: Ink, gifts, books, lotteries and magazines. Yes, magazines. The first couple of months this year were rough but since then we’re travelling well. I think this is because we are obsessive about the category.
It is easy to let the flat retail situation sap your motivation and lure you into a lazy funk about the business. We are having more fun chasing change and finding opportunities which work.