We are prmoting a small selection of our large range of 2010 calendars at the front of the newsagency in addition to a more complete range available in our calendar department in-store.
This front of store display is designed to attract passers-by in the mall and announce that the range is now available.
We plan to leave the calendar promotion up in this traditional magazine display location for a week at least.
We are promoting the 2010 calendar issue of FHM with a display next to where the stock is located in store. This approach of promoting a title where it is usually located is working well for us – most recently with Zoo in this same location.
Too often, our displays are off-location and while they may drive sales, they don;lt train customers as to where the titles can be regularly found.
We were sent Chook Wisdom three years ago and returned all copies received. We received the latest issue last week and will early return these this week. This is a highly specialised title which we feel does not fit with our customers.
Chook Wisdom is a title I’d prefer to be asked if I want. This respects the retailer and the publisher. If I missed the request then I apologise.
CRIKEY! magazine is not working for us. None sold in two months. We will cut supply by 66% and see how it travels over the next couple of issues. We have tried a couple of locations and prime position with these two placements. I’d be interested in how this magazine is travelling for other newsagents.
The creative team at Tower Systems has created two graduation posters which newsagents can download and print. Click here for the first poster and here for the second.
With graduation season almost here, now is a good time to put together graduation cards and gifts (plush, albums, photo frames, journals, travel diaries) together with collateral like the posters to drive sales. Teacher gifts could also be displayed in the same location.
Newsagencies are well positioned to do well from graduation and teacher opportunities since we have cards covering both giving occasions. A good gift offer will help drive card sales and vice versa. The key is visual merchandising which makes it clear that you have an offer serving the need – hence the posters.
Tower Systems provides the poster artwork and other free marketing collateral to newsagents as a way of giving something back – Tower is fortunate to serve in excess of 1,500 newsagents with its Point of Sale software.
A slick con-woman has been hitting Melbourne businesses with a credit card scam. She says she wants to transfer money from a credit card to a debit card. The thing is, she doesn’t have the card. While such a transaction ought to be rejected immediately, she has been able to get beyond store policy in a couple of instances of which I am aware thanks to excellent patter. She was caught out by a vigilant team member at Forest Hill yesterday (the first time she tried this on us) and the police and security alerted.
There is a simple way to stop this – NEVER LET SOMEONE LOAD CASH ONTO A PREPAID DEBIT CARD FROM A CREDIT CARD. I’d let them do it using eftpos because a PIN is required.
I am undertaking a newsagent retail sales benchmark study comparing sales for September-October 2009 against September-October 2008.
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 September 1, 2009 to October 31, 2009 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.
Non Tower newsagents can participate by emailing me for a copy of a spreadsheet template I have prepared.
As with past benchmarks, I expect to get data from between 100 and 120 newsagencies in the next few days. The results will provide an indication of sales performance year on year and give newsagents something with which to compare their businesses.
Given the success we are having with Halloween, I decided to immerse myself into the season as a consumer this year. This meant welcoming trick-or-treaters at the door with candy and hosting a dinner party with costumes and ghoulish food delights.
From the starter of eyeballs two ways through to the Phantom Ginger Cake for dessert, there was total immersion in the Halloween experience. Kids came to the door dressed, a whole crowd at one time. I dressed as an irradiated nuclear plant worker. It was a blast, heaps of fun.
The experience has broadened my view of Halloween. It has certainly changed how I look at Halloween from a business perspective. I have a personal context now for how this season works on different levels for kids and adults and how we can leverage this next year to make Halloween bigger and better and more fun in-store.
While we are unlikely to reach the level of engagement in the US, where two-thirds of the adult population dress up or engage with the evening, there is no doubt that Halloween will get bigger here and that it will morph from just a kids fun time to something in which all ages participate.
To those who eschew Halloween as a Amercian commercial season I say – get over it. It’s harmless fun for adults and kids.
Halloween will be a more significant commercial season for us next year!
Barnes and Noble are claiming their soon to lainch Nook e-reader is a hit based on sales data. They say it is their fastest selling single item.
The Nook further pushes e-readers into the mass market and demonstrates the stength of this new distribution channel for print content.
I wonder how much newsagents are taking note of these developments.
Another day and another e-reader launch. This time, the MediaBook from Creative – announced in Singapore.
Distribution newsagents are talking about the imminent new contracts from News Limited. There is plenty of speculation in the marketplace including rumours that News is not negotiating the contracts centrally through the ANF and that the contracts will be for one year only.
I don’t have any inside information about the new contracts.
What I do know is that while some newsagents make good money from home delivery, many do not. The inability to charge a price based on the costs of delivering the service stops home delivery being a business.
The drop in real terms of the fee permitted by the newspaper publishers over the last fifteen years is what has caused hundreds of newsagents to walk away from their newspaper home delivery businesses.
While I am on the record saying that newsagents should not enter into new contracts, I appreciate that many will because they want security and because a contract is crucial to their business funding.
At minimum, a contract must provide the newsagent with fair levers which they can use to act as business people in the twenty-first century as opposed to indentured servants from yesteryear.
The future of the current newspaper home delivery model will be decided over the next year. Newsagents who want to remain in the home delivery business must fight for their rights.
While I sold off the home delivery side of my newsagency three years ago, My software company, Tower Systems, serves in excess of 1,500 newsagents, many of whom have home delivery businesses. I care about the health of the newsagency and am committed to helping where I can to achieve a more equitable outcome from newspaper home delivery.
The big day is finally here. October 31 – Halloween. This has been a terrific Halloween season for us, the best ever. Excellent sales of Halloween related items at fantastic margin – 50% and above. Sales across categories: party items, candy, magazines and cards. We have demonstrated our competitiveness on range and price and this has won new customers for us thanks to great word of mouth. Halloween has also given us a reason to create in-store theatre and this benefits the whole of the business.
Halloween is a natural fit for newsagents. Done well, sales can beat some other traditional seasons. We are aleady discussing Halloween 2010.
Ann Davies, US correspondent for The Age, has written an excellent piece which provides context for the Halloween celebreation in the US from an Australian’s perspective.
Like most newsagents, we start the week with a full waterfall for all major weeklies. As the week unfolds, we scale back and use the empty pockets to promote titles from other categories. We carefully select and place titles. Click on the image for a larger version of how our magazine space looked on Thursday this week. See how we block titles and use logic in adjacencies – Real Living and Home Beautiful together for example. We always double-pocket these co-located titles – to give them a chance of being noticed in this most shopped magazine real-estate. We know our approach works because we track sales from these pockets.
Newsagents I talk with usually do not have a strategy for filling space as the week unfolds. I have found that a consistent process for this works well, others in the business can follow the process. Putting thought into the titles you co-locate is more likely to drive the sales outcome you want than letting anyone put any titles into the spare pockets.
Magazines are vitally important to us because the range in an average newsagency is our only product-based point of difference. If we embrace this by working the category we make our business a destination. While print has challenges, these are more long term. Aggressively managing magazines today provides a valuable point of differeence for newsagents over other magazine retailers.
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Apple has sent specifications for its new device (iTablet?) to media outlets here.
Apple is the master of content-maker engagement. Look at iTunes. If they get supplier engagement and if the new device is as game-changing as the iPod then newsagents will have a new distribution channel competitor sooner than expected.
We stopped offering the Western Union money transfer service in August. While I was concerned that we would have to recommend the government owned Post Office opposite, the benefits of ceasing the service were too great.
It seems that Australia Post has reached the same conclusion as us, they are no longer offering the Western Union service. I am not sure if this applies in other Government owned Post Offices.
For us the decision was about customer service. There was a conflict between the Western Union service and customer flow for the rest of the business. as we had evolved, Western Union became incompatible.
I figured Australia Post would keep Western Union because their customers are used to long lines and slow transactions.
Click on the image to read the sign shoppers see as they enter a Golden Casket agency (maybe a newsagency) somewhere in Queensland. The photo is from the ABC Brisbane website – yes, the world gets to see how one retailer deals with customer queries.
While we are challenged daily with questions for which we consider the answers are obvious, cheerful customer service should be central to every contact with a newsagency.
The gap between the customer experience delivered in newsagencies is greater than the gap between us on most other matters.
Signs like this empower any marketing or franchise group in the newsagency channel which enforces customer service standards for businesses trading under their brand. It is why some of these groups will stop representing themselves as newsagencies.
There is considerable buzz around the December issue of Esquire magazine and their use of “augmented reality”. If you hold some pages of the magazine on front of a webcam, additional editorial content will come to life. The is the seocnd time Esquire has experimented with interaction. Portfolio tells us:
The future of magazines begins November 16. That is, if the future of magazines is “augmented reality” in the form of fancy ads and gratuitous computer animation.
While a nice way to drive interaction with the magazine, this, of itself, is not the future of magazines. The future of print magazines is about content. The future of magazine brands is about a range of initiatives including what they are doing with Esquire.
If When we see these initiatives here in Australia, newsagents will need to consider giving our customers the ability to browse these augmented reality features.
In the Night Garden is a welcome new launch from ACP Magazines this year. While not high in volume, it appears to be gaining traction. we are having more customers ask for the title. This tells me that the TV show and other coverage for the brand is paying off. Given the customer requests, we now place this title prominently in our children’s section. We are going to request a doubling of our supply on the back of customer interest and recent sales.
Children’s magazines are somewhat forgotten in the magazine department. Rightfully so given the approach of some titles. The magazines are junk as are the gifts with every issue. Quality titles do well but there are not enough of these around which to create a strong presence. I hope that In the Night Garden continues to focus on quality and attract new readers.
I was skeptical when I saw the Men’s Health DVD / Magazine special on Monday morning this week. I thought the $16.95 price was too high for a newsagency and the packaging challenging for it to work in our fixturing. While I know that Men’s Health works for us, this product is different to the regular magazine. That said, we have it on display next to Men’s Health – where it should be.
We received four copies and sold our first on Wednesday, three days in. My skepticism is fading.
Given the special interest customers we attract, we should realise that price is not so much an issue. Content is valuable to the right shopper.
A month or so ago there were plenty of people saying that e-readers were a flash in the pan and that Australians would not have much interest in the Amazon Kindle. It is interesting to see some reverse their opinion in the face of the considerable traffic being generated around the Kindle launch here. As I have blogged for a couple of years, the Kindle and similar devices should not be underestimated. There is a card for this.
Mediabiznet is covering the engagement between the publisher of Australian Traveller and newsagents at this blog.
Every day I hear of or see further examples of the reach of this blog and the conversations here. It is gratifying to see its usefulness.
On Australian Traveller, smart newsagents are promoting this title to leverage the bonus commission from the current issue and to strengthen sales given the on-going additional commission being paid to newsagents – 30% as opposed to the usual 25%. The more newsagents support this the more publishers will engage with us.
Our sales for the current issue of Donna Hay magazine are more than double what we have historically achieved by this point in the on-sale period.
We will sell out with time to spare. Overall sales will be up on recent issues.
I put our success of this issue of Donna Hay down to an excellent free gift, the tea towel is high quality, and our own aggressive merchandising approach.
We have Donna Hay magazine with our food titles and with the column of food magazines in the middle of our women’s weeklies titles – surrounded by weeklies on either side.
While we had it at the counter for the first three days of the on-sale, this did not work for us. Our success has come from the placement with the weeklies. I watched a customer yesterday early in the morning. The picked up Take 5 and That’s Life and browsed but did not purchase Donna Hay. While we did not get the Donna Hay sale this time, they browsed it when the would most likely have missed it had it not been in this second location.
Our success with Donna Hay and food titles in general is due to this column we made space for in with our weeklies. It costs nothing to try.
Experimenting like this is important for newsagents. it separates us from the cookie-cutter approach of supermarkets, convenience stores and petrol outlets. It is only by experimentation in our newsagencies that we find what works for us to drive significant sales growth. This is usually achieved by placement outside of what publishers request for their title.
Smart publishers will tap into this opportunity and work more close with newsagents.
A smart newsagent in Queensland is explaining the death of the Trading Post to customers with a sign and a copy of a notice from Telstra.
This is a good way to head off some of the questions which are bound to arise when Trading Post customers come in for the next issue and can’t find it.
Meanwhile, the Melbourne Trader launched yesterday, as part of the Melbourne Observer newspaper. They have picked up some people from the Trading Post in Melbourne to help run the new venture.
We are having success with these small chocolate packs at the counter for Halloween. When we first started in Halloween years ago it was all about the kids. Now it is a season which crosses generations and tastes – including people who will jump at any excuse to purchase chocolate. I know newsagents who will sell more Halloween related gifts and toys than they do plush and chocolate at Easter or Valentine’s Day. The numbers I am seeing suggest that Halloween 2009 is a bumper season.
The Monday / Wednesday lottery game jackpotted last night to $8 million this coming Monday – a record for this game. While not the most popular lottery through the week, the large jackpot will drive a good boost to sales, especially right after the $20 million superdraw on Saturday. We find the day after a superdraw an excellent opportunity to selling people who have won small prizes into new games.
The traffic boost from the superdraw and a (small) record lottery jackpot is most welcome and we will make the most of it.
Our marketing focus will be around this being a record.