We are promoting a selected range of Crossword magazines in the lead-in to our main lottery counter at the front of our newsagency. Crossword magazines sell well to lottery customers. This display presents range and well known brands. We have sought to make it visually appealing to passers-by.
We have timed this to fit with the extra traffic from the Powerball $50 million jackpot.
We are promoting Gardening Australia over the weekend at the prime counter position following the success of the New Idea promotion in this same location eariler this week.
We know that Peter Cundall is popular with our customers from past sales featuring his – the article about his vegie patch is (hopefully) the hook for this issue in our newsagency.
Gold Coast magazine continues its 100% commission offer for newsagents this month – ensuring a good location for the title in newsagencies on the Coast. The key to future newsagent support for Gold Coast will be how the publications moves out of the 100% commission offer. In the meantime, newsagents can make good money from this title.
This photo shows what newsagents often contront as a result of customer frustration with bagged magazines. The bag is torn open and left to mess the area. It damages the newsagency and the magazine itself. Publishers like newsagencies because of our browser traffic yet they often block browsing by bagging titles. As for the free magazine in the bag – with so many titles offering these I suspect the value proposition is lost.
I published this photo in response a question from a publisher on another blog post about bagging magazines.
I doubt we will ever be able to stop back issues being bagged with the current issue of a magazine. I at least hope we see a reduction. There must be better ways to promote magazines.
Sales of Just Cars dried up in our newsagency for the last issue. We sold one copy, a fraction of what we usually sell. It was displayed in the usual place with the same space allocation – a half waterfall. Nothing changed around it. This collapse of sales is out of whack with the performance of other motoring titles in our newsagency. Is this just us or did other newsagents experience the same with Just Cars?
We are in for an excellent week thanks to Powerball not going off tonight. the $50 million Powerball jackpot is set to drive excellent sales in newsagencies and other lottery outlets.
We have our plans ready to dress the store, run promotions and make the most of the opportunity – for our business, our team and our customers.
Given the hoopla over the $90 million we will need to educate customers about Powerball compared to OzLotto and find new ways to make the $50 million first division opportunity enticing. Syndicates are key to this, based on recent experience.
While I am yet to complete the newsagent sales benchmark study for the April / June quarter, I have completed my magazine analysis. Overall, magazine sales in the sample group of over 100 newsagencies are down, on average, 9%. This is based on a same store year on year basis. What is interesting is that the decline is lower for the weeklies and major monthlies. Weeklies are down 4% and major monthlies are down 5%. This is a change in the trend which I saw in the January / March newsagent sales benchmark study.
There are more newsagencies reporting growth than earlier this year. However, this is balanced by some reporting considerable declines. In most cases, the larger declines appear to be related to economic conditions.
The sales benchmark study involved data from more than one hundred newsagencies covering April through June 2009 and the same period in 2008. I removed newsagencies at extremes from the dataset where the extreme results appeard to be completely due to local factors.
I’ll be on the Mediaweek TV program on the Sky News Business Channel today at 2:30 with james manning, Editor of Mediaweek magazines and Eugene Varricchio, Group General Manager – Retail & Distribution, ACP magazines. It should be a broad discussion including magazines, magazine distribution and the role of newsagents.
With the Michael Jackson Tribute edition of Rolling Stone currently sold out, we have moved the latest issue of Hello to the counter. This is the location from which we sold the most copies of the Rolling Stone issue – brilliant impulse business. I am confident that this issue of Hello will perform as well here. The keys to success for this type of sales register promotion is lack of clutter around the offer and that it is a relevant offer.
Magazine distributor NDD sent us this More Sudoku title yesterday. A check of our data shows that supply was not warranted. A check of the performance of other Sudoku titles shows that supply was not warranted. We don’t need more sudoku titles!
More Sudoku is a good example of imported magazine junk which we do not need in Australia. We have plenty of locally published Sudoku titles – more than the soft segment of the crossword category needs.
While NDD will say that sales of the title justify distribution of the title to newsagents, I would only believe this with evidence. NDD is paid a fee to ship the title out to newsagents and a fee to process returns – if this title is managed under usual arrangements. Newsagents pay for the title and carry the cost of floor stock for the shelf life. Newsagents and the publisher have a risk. NDD does not.
NDD is developing a track record for responding to my blog posts like this with threatening correspondence from their lawyer or similarly threatening correspondence from their General Manager. The last letter sounded like a kid in a playground as it said what about Gotch and Network, the other two magazine distributors.
The best response from NDD would be to kill off cash-sucking titles like More Sudoku, and set fair performance benchmarks which make NDD commercially responsible for the fringe product they push on newsagents.
they have good titles like Notebook, Vogue and Gardening Australia which cause newsagents little or no grief yet they also have trash like More Sudoku which sucks cash and space for little return.
I don’t mention Network and Gotch as often as NDD here because they account for fewer oversupply issues in my experience. Also, I have considerably more control over the titles and quantities I receive with them.
While blogging here has improved my personal situation with NDD, there are fewer oversupply situations than previously, I know from what I see in other newsagencies that mine is not a universal experience. Their attention to my supply should be equal to their attention on supply to all newsagents.
The various lottery agencies have annonced that Powerball will jackpot to $50 million next week if it does not go off tomorrow night. Now, that would be excellent timing.
Universal Magazines demonstrated this morning that they have listened to concerns expressed by newsagents here and elsewhere. They have changed newsagent terms for Complete Bride magazine. Billing is now delayed by two months, supply is split into two deliveries, newsagents no longer have to return full copies and supply allocation is now more finely tuned to sales.
These are welcome changes. I hope other publishers take note.
The changes improve newsagent cash-flow relating to Complete Bride magazine. They also dramatically reduce the cost of returns – given the weight of the title.
Newsagents should be encouraged by the moves made by Universal for they demonstrate that a publisher is able to significantly alter their terms and distribution arrangements to better serve newsagents.
While it was initially a rocky road with Universal (and their lawyers), the result is good for newsagents and hopefully good for them.
The US Tennis magazine which came in this morning features a Wimbledon preview. It is out of date already. There is a case for magazines with dated content to be air-freighted. Out of date magazines like the current issue of Tennis make us look out of date.
The Age has announced that from July 18, interstate editions will no longer be supplied with the classified advertising inserts: Domain, Drive and My Career. They say that this decision has been taken because “most interstate consumers don’t need or use those sections”. Newsagents I have spoken with say that half their customers want these sections. The Q&A issued by The Age indicates that they will not reverse this decision. Click here for a copy.
Our book sale is in full swing and delivering good sales. Being at the front of the newsagency, it is is drawing in passers-by and adding to the basket of shoppers in-store. Book sales like this, managed well, deliver an excellent margin on good sales – lifting the overall margin achieved by the business. While we try outposts from time to time, we prefer an in-store offer because of the lower labour and real-estate cost. We are supporting the sale with a flyer featuring many of the titles we have on offer.
Tower Systems has released artwork for new in-store collateral promoting mobile phone recharge. This is available to users of the Tower eziPass electronic voucher platform. The plan is to release further new collateral heading into Christmas – so that the offer remains fresh. Mobile recharge is a good impulse purchase opportunity in newsagencies and fresh collateral is key to that. The artwork is available to paticipating newsagents without cost.
The trial of the new XchangeIT platform and associated initiatives by magazine distributors has expanded this week with more newsagents engaged. Being able to process returns, regular and supplementary, electronically and receiving an electronic confirmation almost immediately cuts magazine management time and improves cash-flow.
This is the most significant magazine management change (opportunity) for newsagents in years.
This new promotional display space we created next to our Darrell Lea stand is being put to good use this week promoting the latest issue of Good Food magazine from ACP. We are using this ‘found’ space to display titles which are located nearby: food, home and living, health and gardening. It has worked well these past few weeks with the new issue of Good Health. Hopefully, we will find more customers for Good Food as sales are not where they need to be in our newsagency – despite its good value.
When it launched I made mention of how easy it is to display Women’s Health – that the while background on the cover helps it stand out from the mosh-pit of colour in a newsagency. It remains one of the favourite titles for us to display because of the break it provides from all the colour elsewhere. The simple yet bold cover design certainly helps with visual cut through. We have the latest issue on an aisle end where it stands out.
Business Week magazine has been put on the market. Folio has the story.
We are promoting New Idea at our prime counter position this week. We made this promotion choice because of the McCafe Chocolate croissant and coffee giveaway connected with this issue of New Idea.
We prefer to promote titles in this location which have a giveaway associated with them which we think will resonate with our customers. At least 75% of our title choices work well.
We are promoting Home Beautiful out the front of our newsagency, near our main lottery counter, this week in a very different use of this promotional stand. This is a test as Home Beautiful sales are okay for us but flat. We want to see if this location achieves some growth. We will leave the display up for three days and keep it longer is sales warrant.
It’s 7:15am and we are yet to receive our magazines. Ugh.
UPDATE. Relief driver. They were delivered to the wrong location in the centre.
Click on the image to see a larger version of the front page of The Guardian website which I saw this morning – when I access ed the site from Victoria. Acorss the top is a Powerball ad. The ad was pulsing – making clicking this compelling. The ad took me to the Golden Casket site which offered me a selection of Powerball numbers and all I needed to do was enter a Queesnland address to register and purchase. While I understand the desire of lottery companies to drive their higher margin online sales, I wish they would proactively promote the retail network from their website. We promote their brand freely in our stores after all.
My newsagency software company, Tower Systems, is hosting a free online training workshop for newsagents on the new XchangeIT standards tomorrow – July 14. This is a repeat of the training already undertaken by hundreds of Tower newsagents. Any newsagent is welcome to participate. The workshop will cover the what you need to do to access EDI returns, including supplementary returns – and thereby access faster credits for returns. Please register through the booking page at the Tower website.