To make way for Family Circle at the counter, we moved our Dolly display to the entrance to our main women’s magazine aisle.  This stand from ACP makes it easy for displaying titles with free gifts – especially titles which appeal to women given the location.

It also puts the Twilight themed Dolly in front of shoppers who may not have vivited for a magazine purchase.

This second photo shows the back of the stand.  You can see that we are also pitching Dolly to shoppers as they leave the magazine aisle.  Too often these merchandise display stands from ACP are only used on one side.  Use of both sides drives better sales.

While there is a bit of work involved in moving a display from one location to another, we find it worthwhile.  It freshens the offer and helps us balance titles we are promoting.  We make these decisions based on what we know about our customers and not because of demands from publishers.

We are promoting the Christmas special edition of Family Circle magazine at the busiest point on our counter this weekend.  I expect this to work well for us as an impulse purchase – it did last year from this same location.  We will leave Family Circle in this location until at least Monday with a view to bringing it back later in the on sale.

We are promoting the Family Circle Christmas issue (out today) next to our main newspaper stand as well as in a full waterfall display in our women’s weeklies magazine section.  We will move this title two or three times over the next few weeks.  We took the same approach last year and sold out.

With Family Circle only publishing for special seasons it is important to get it in front of customers elsewhere as they are less likely to  look for it.  Our goal is to sell out before the end of the month.  We have ordered extra stock.

We have relocated our ACP Magazines basket builder unit to next to our newspaper stand.  As the photo shows we are using this location to try and drive sales for the Australian Women’s Weekly.  We are now into the second week of the on-sale for this issue and have not been provided any significant collateral with which to promote the issue – hence our local initiatives.  We still have AWW featured at the entrance to the women’s magazines aisle – the newspaper stand appeals to a different mix of customers.

We are promoting the latest issue of Dolly magazine (out today) at the counter because of the premium gifts accompanying the title. Historically, Dolly has not been an impulse purchase for us.  Their recent gift strategy has seen this change.  The gifts set a benchmark and an expectation which will be a challenge to maintain.  I expect this latest issue of Dolly to move quickly because of the relevance of the gifts to the target reader.