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

Promoting The Agatha Christie Collection

fhn_agatgha_christie.JPGWe are promoting the new Agatha Christie partwork, The Agatha Christie Collection,  at the front counter to tap into the usual promotional buzz around the first issue.

For those new here, partworks are important to the newsagency channel. Getting customers to sign up to have a partwork putaway locks in return traffic. I have data which shows that regular putaway customers are 30% more likely to purchase other items in a visit than a regular customer.

For the Agatha Christie partwork we will pitch putaways at the counter. The benefits are that we keep their copy aside, advise them by text message when the next issue is in and their special order is kept safe. It’s an old-school service which customers love.

On partworks more generally, my understanding is that this year will be quite lean on new releases. That is unfortunate (if it pans out that way). Partworks promoted on TV generate excellent traffic for newsagencies.

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Newsagency opportunities

Promoting Woman’s Day and Valentine’s Day

fhn_wd_feb082010.JPGWe are promoting Woman’s Day at the front of our shop this week, adjacent to our Valentine’s Day gift display.  The free cookbook with Woman’s Day offers recipes for love so the placement near our Valentine’s Day offer makes sense to us.  The display will remain up for a few days.  Read on…  I am frustrated with ACP and their promotion of Woman’s Day for four weeks with free cookbooks.  They cut our supply last week and this week and in doing this restricted the gains we could achieve.  It’s as if they don’t want growth.  Some decisions by magazine companies are ridiculous.

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Money more important than safety at The Age

age_feb082010.JPGThe Age had an excellent special liftout today with safety tips for young drivers.  Part of the promotional material for this special report on the front page of the newspaper was covered up this morning by another post-it type note – this time for ING Direct.  What is the point of a masthead or front page editorial promotional material if you’re prepared to take money to cover this up?

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newspaper masthead desecration

Playing with magazine fixtures

magazine_fixture.JPGWe are trying magazine fixturing in the photo in one of the stores I am connected with. It offers more full-face facings than traditional newsagency magazine fixturing. We have the units in the photo on the back wall and other (new but more traditional) fixturing in two aisles.

The lighting for the units in the photo makes the covers pop. It helps us get the most of the full face display.  Editors would like how their publications look.

The power of the display is crucial since this display is on the back walls. We are using this to draw people into the store. The pockets are deep – at least three times deeper than traditional newsagency pockets. This lets us store more product in less space.

We are using the back wall for our high volume women’s titles. While we co-locate a selection at the front of the shop, these are more to attract passers-by.

I first saw units like those we are using in high volume transit locations and have wanted to try them in a newsagency for some time. Space was always the issue – you display fewer titles per square metre.  Newsagents are used to focusing on range over visual merchandising.

While it is early days, I am very happy with their useability and the customer interaction of the new units.

Like all good fixtures, they can be easily changed – the days of purpose built set and forget newsagency fixtures are over.

The shopfit was designed and installed by Interfit.

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magazines

Promoting magazine brand extensions

hb_bathrooms.JPGWe are promoting Home Beautiful and the Bathrooms brand extension with each other.  It makes sense to try and leverage the main brand in promoting the extension – especially in the home and living category.  It surprises me how many brand extensions go unnoticed by newsagents.  They are a terrific opportunity to extend the shopping basket.  All it takes is careful placement in-store – a small time investment for a sales gain.

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magazines

Visual merchandising ideas from Chinatown

cny_forest_hill.JPGI went to Chinatown in Melbourne last week to seek out ideas for dressing our newsagencies for Chinese New Year. In addition to learning more about Chinese New Year and discovering some cool Visual Merchandising ideas, I was able to buy a range of collateral including the tiger in the photo. We have this and other items displayed around our lottery counter.

We have also located our range of Chinese New Year cards and red packets at the lottery counter. Some of these cards are from Hallmark and some sources during my trip to Chinatown.

Chinese New Year is part commercial season and part an opportunity to identify with and show respect for our customers from China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Phillipines and other Asian countries where this season is celebrated. Our display is more about the latter as our range of merchandise is quite small.

The trip to Chinatown was a reminder of the value of getting outside our businesses when looking for new ideas.

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Newsagency opportunities

Fishing magazines selling well

fishing_magazines.JPGWe are seeing good sales from fishing titles.  This is not from any special effort on our part other than maintaining a tidy and easy to find space in among the sports magazines.  The titles performing best for us are those locally focused like North East Angler and Fishing & Boating Monthly.  We give these titles good positioning since they better represent the point of difference of our range over that of a supermarket.

Our fishing titles are wedged between boating / yachting titles and caravan and motorhome titles.

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magazines

Valentine’s chocolate hearts a nice shopping basket extender

valentines_candy.JPGWe have had chocolate hearts at the counter in all of our stores for the last week.  While they are there for Valentine’s Day, they are really there to tap into shoppers treating themselves with a chocolate for their trip to the car or their next stop.  Most are purchased on impulse.  We usually sell two or more at a time.  While we have these hearts bagged as gifts elsewhere in-store, it is the counter unit which works the best.

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Newsagency opportunities

Last call for January sales benchmark data

On Monday I finalise the analysis of January 2010 vs 2009 sales data from newsagents participating in the sales benchmark study.  I already have data from more than 100 newsagencies.  Reading the results is interesting, as always.

Tower Newsagents can participate by sending a Monthly Sales Comparison report: tick the box to exclude home deliveries, and tick the box for a category breakdown. Set your first date range (on the left) to January 1, 2010 to January 31, 2010 and the date range of the right to one year earlier.

Once the report is on the screen, click the PDF button to save this as a PDF, go into your email software and send a copy of the PDF to me at mark@towersystems.com.au. I’ll publish the benchmark results here and elsewhere so all newsagents can benefit.

The results will provide newsagents with a useful comparison.  They will also provide a broader health check with which assess the broader channel.

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Newsagency benchmark

Fairfax Media unhappy with ABC Open initiative

The ABC Open project which was announced by CEO Mark Scott last year.  It aims to provide new online coverage of local stories in fifty locations around the country.  The ad posted this week by the ABC for producers shows the focus of the initiative:

The ABC Open project will offer regional audiences the chance to participate in ways that have never existed before. It will shine a spotlight on regional Australia through text-based stories, blogs, photography, video, and audio published online and on new platforms. 50 digital jobs have been created to help bring those stories and issues to the world.

It reads to me like a citizen journalism initiative – community focused rather than commercial.

Brian McCarthy, head of Fairfax Media, was reported by Fairfax outlets yesterday as saying that ABC Open could force the closure of some of their regional newspapers.

He says the ABC Open network “threatens to undermine the viability of the excellent service commercial media organisations such as Fairfax Media and Rural Press have provided to regional and rural Australia for decades”.

“I do not believe it is the role of the ABC to disrupt the commercial landscape by building empires with public funds,” Mr McCarthy said in a statement on Friday.

While local and regional newspapers do provide local coverage, my reading of the remit for ABC Open is that it will be far more community driven than what we have seen before.  If would be hard for a commercial organisation with shareholder return as their key priority to deliver on this as the ABC could.

While I understand McCarthy’s need to protect his company’s interests, I see the local newspapers and ABC Open as operating in two difference worlds.

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Media disruption

Apple meets with publishers

Apple CEO and saviour Steve Jobs, met with key publishers in New York this week to pitch the iPad as CNN Money ed overnight:

But the fact that Jobs himself flew to New York a week later — and that the top executives of America’s leading national newspapers and magazines turned out to meet him — may be taken as a sign of how badly both sides need each other.

The iPad, in its current form or the next egneration (expected later this year) is a game changing device for delivering access to content.

Apple Insider has more on the pitch by Jobs.

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Media disruption

Pitching the AFL Record and AFL 2010 Season Guide

afl_record_2010.JPGWe are pitching the AFL Record NAB CUP 2010 and the AFL Record Season Guide 2010 at the counter and in our sports section at newsXpress Forest Hill.  They will sell well on impulse – hence the premium counter location for the next few days.

The 2010 season prospectus sold out in a couple of days.

As this week shows, this counter space is a key promotion location for us.  The AFL display we put up yesterday is the third for this week and while it takes time to create these displays, the effort is well worth it in sales results.  It is terrific seeing customers come to the counter with their purchases and add another item (or two) on impulse.  While not always pretty, these counter displays are functional and valuable.

The supply quantity we received is up 40% on last year.  I’m happy about that because we sold out.

UPDATE Saturday, 5pm: sales for the first two days are great.  We’re chasing a sell-out again.

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magazines

Magazine oversupply not justified

On January 21 I wrote about the gross oversupply of the latest issue of Gameinformer magazine.  Up to yesterday, sales do not warrant the 600% increase in supply.  We have the title in a half waterfall, taking valuable space.  This is a good example of where a publisher ought to carry the responsibility of using our space and time to support their expectations.

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magazine distribution

Strong early Valentine’s Day sales

valentines_day_cards.JPGValentine’s Day card sales seem to have kicked in earlier this year in several of my newsagencies.  We have been seeing good sales all week, more so than at the same point in previous years for this season.  We are also seeing good gift sales, especially for the Darrell Lea gifts – again earlier than previous Valentine’s Day seasons.

Where we are having the most success, we have Valentine’s Day product out in the high-traffic dance floor.  We prefer to not remove regular cards for seasons. The cards are placed with gifts: plush, mugs, frames, books and chocolates.

Hopefully, the early sales we are seeing augur well for the next week.

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Gifts

Parties for Kids no party for newsagents

parties_for_kids.JPGWe received Parties for Kids from NDD a couple of days ago. It’s dated, on the cover, Autumn 2006. Seriously!

Judging by the noticeable discoloration on the cover (click on the image to see the detail of this), I’d say this is stock from the back of a warehouse somewhere which someone decided to ship out because they needed cash. No wonder newsagents often consider themselves the dumping ground for some magazine product.

We will early return our stock next week. I don’t see any value on a discoloured four year old title taking up space on my shelves, especially since the segment is well covered by current day product.

That a distributor sees fit to circulate four year old title, damaged stock, to newsagents asays a lot about the sick one-sided magazine distribution system in this country.  Parties for Kids is the kind of title which makes newsagents angry and diverts our attention, space and cash from more important titles.

Good publishers should help us stop titles like this being distributed. However, since they all are guilty of sending junk, we ought to develop mechanisms to protect our assets from abuse.

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magazine distribution

Selling phones in a newsagency

phones.JPGWe sell phones in several of my newsagencies. They’re selling well. A couple of times customers have told us that they came to us because they didn’t want the hassle they get at a phone company shop. We don’t have plans to sell, just simple phones which work with a prepaid account.

There is good evidence around that selling phones drives recharge business. I’d agree with that from what I see. There is also the benefit of bonus recharge commission when you sell the starter kits – the telcos want new accounts after all.

The floorspace allocated to phones is small.  The collateral promoting the handsets doubles as a pitch for the recharge business.

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Newsagency opportunities

Hiding the magazine masthead

magazine_coverup.JPGSome publishers just don’t get it.  Promoting a triple pack is more important than promoting the title itself.  Maybe they think this is what gets people picking up titles in-store.  They should ask customers what they think about these packs.  I see them as lazy marketing.

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magazines

Magazine show on TV tonight

Inside The Great Magazines is a program on ABC TV tonight.  It looks like a must watch for newsagents:

A new frontier is opening up, a place where money and size are often the defining factor in a magazine’s influence. With corporate mergers accelerating, magazines often share corporate owners with other cross-over ventures.

Facing new challenges from the Internet and increasingly segmented niches, many wonder how the great magazines can survive.

This hour investigates the work of impassioned individual editors, writers and photographers creating magazines within these new market realities.

Follow Time magazine’s acclaimed Person of the Year issue and the evolution of a new women’s magazine in Afghanistan started on ‘a penny and a prayer’ in the final of this thought-provoking series.

This is the last episode of a three part series.

UPDATE (9:48pm) okay so this show is already out of date.  It’s not relevant to today’s situation.

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magazines

In News close to an iPad content deal?

From a report in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Mr Murdoch said he was moving closer to imposing charges for access to all News Corp’s newspaper websites, and he revealed the company was in ”advanced discussions” with hand-held device manufacturers about a subscription model allowing people to access media content ”whenever and wherever they want it”.

”Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things digital,” he said. ”We’re on the cusp of a digital revolution from which our shareholders will profit handsomely.”

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Media disruption

How Australia Post uses the postal service to hurt newsagents

auspost_reflex_feb10.JPGI received a letter a week ago offering Reflex delivered to my office free for $4.89 a ream.  No newsagent can compete with that price since we don’t have the buying power of a federal government protected monopoly behind us.  We also can’t compete on brand recognition.  Australia Post has great brand recognition because of their protected mail services.  As they say, they are part of every day.  They are only part of every day because the government protects them.

Successive governments, Liberal and Labor, have permitted Australia Post to morph into a broad retail network with a key focus on stationery usually sold by retailers such as newsagents.

Every dollar they suck out of the economy for Reflex and similar excellent deals is a dollar less small business newsagents and other retailers can make for private enterprise.

I don’t blame Australia Post. Their bosses, successive governments, have allowed them to run loose.

This is a policy issue.  Politicians need to decide how they feel about a government owned and protected retail network of 865 stores using their guarantees customer traffic (thanks to protection) competing with independent retailers like newsagents.

If I were a politician building an election year campaign on working families I would want to make sure that I actually supported working families, like newsagents.

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Australia Post

Early returning magazines to make space

codebreak.JPGAnother title came out from the folks at Puzzle People yesterday.  We received a chunk of stock for which we had no spare space on our shelves.  To make room, we returned another of their titles a few weeks early.  Newsagents don’t have the cash or the shelf space to be the warehouses for publishers and distributors.  This is one of the reasons why titles are returned early. Publishers have control over timing and supply quantities – two key factors in early return consideration.

While we will miss one or two sales of Codebreak from Puzzle People, taking it (or another title) off early was the only option.

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magazines

Promoting Better Homes and Gardens

fhn_bhg_feb03101.JPGWe are promoting Better Homes and Gardens with a power end display for the next week.  The collateral mix from Pacific Magazines is excellent and will allow us to easily create another display elsewhere when we move the title on from this location.  We also have BHG in with our weeklies as well as its usual location.  Thanks to the TV show tie-in, we will promote the title heavily Friday through Sunday.

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magazines

Bushfire book late, small and overpriced

bushfire.jpgWe received Beat the Bushfire Enemy with Knowledge book from NDD this morning.  It’s $22.95 with a four month on sale.  Ridiculous!  It’s an odd size (A5), out of season, has a long on-sale and is priced outside reasonable for most newsagency circulation product.  We have already given our free booklets on bushfire readiness.  Newsagencies in bushfire areas have had stock of other titles for some time.  I don’t see any upside for newsagents in being given this title by NDD.  We are early returning our copies – it’s crazy that we pay for this.

Titles like this affect other publishers because they suck newsagent time, space and money.

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magazines

Take 5 with a free Mills and Boon book

fhn_take5_feb0310.JPGThe latest issue of Take 5 is a challenge (in a good way).  It’s bagged with a free Mills and Boon book and does not fit in magazine shelves of flat-stack well.  We have addressed this by giving the magazine prime counter space for the next few days to move stock.  I’m sure it will sell well.

Surprisingly, we only received one poster to promote what is a good deal – we made do by copying the cover.

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