We have decided to promote The Wiggles magazine at the counter at our newsXpress Forest Hill store this week.

We selected this title because it is back to school week in Victoria and I figured that education will be top of mind. The Wiggles magazine is educational like the show. It also has freebies which come with the magazine so it fits our criteria for use of this space.

I love how bright the display is – it’s hard to miss at the counter.

From yesterday’s sales we know this display will be a success, it is at perfect kid-in-the-trolley height.

The sales will further demonstrate the value of placing carefully and locally selected titles at counter within a well presented display.

The quantity we receive of Golf Magazine usually fits nicely into a pocket, usually. This month, thanks to the publisher sending the current issue with a “bonus” magazine, the one pocket allocated to the title is insufficient. If we leave it as shown in the photo, product will be damaged and the publisher would be rightly annoyed at the poor representation. The alternative is to give this title an extra pocket but that means double the real-estate for the same sales.

While I could store excess stock in the back room and bring it out when space in the pocket frees, this would mean another title-specific process and with around 1,300 titles on the shelves who has the time for this?

So, what is the answer? If it were my call I would ensure that the product itself has the best possible value rather than relying on old stock (in a sealed bag!) to achieve this. But I am not the publisher. I wish publishers would think through the implications of their actions: some newsagents will leave spare stock in their back rooms and it will never make it to the shelves, others will shove more into one pocket and others will give the title more space at their own cost.

The ideal would be a more considered retailer-friendly approach to pursuing incremental sales.

This is the front of the ACP Magazines basket builder stand we have. It’s called that because it is designed to drive impulse purchases and thereby add to the shopping basked. It is planagramed with each slot allocated to a title. As it is on castors we move the stand every few weeks to counter regulars becoming blind to it.

I have watched customers purchase from the several times this week. They approach the counter with their purchase and while waiting for the person in front they pickup a magazine and add it to their basket. This is the basket working at its best. The key to this success is location.

While many newsagents push their ACP stand against a wall, we like to use both sides. This photo shows the back of the stand as we created it Wednesday this week. Even though the Australian Women’s Weekly sold well without this extra pitch, we have enough stock to warrant the real-estate.

My point with this blog post is to say that co-locating magazines, on a stand such as this from ACP or something you make for yourself, works if you have a professional looking stand in the right place offering popular titles for which a quick purchase decision can be made. It is all about making every sale as valuable as possible. We can influence this more through product placement than we often give ourselves credit for.

Following the tremendous success with promoting the Australian Women’s Weekly in a small stand in front of our newspaper stand, we are now promoting People’s Friend in the same way.  It will be interesting to see if we can achieve above average sales as a result of co-location of this title.

The newspaper stand is the second most visited point in our Forest Hill shop so it is logical we try and gain the maximum value from this traffic.

We are careful to ensure that all newspapers can still be accessed and their covers easily seen.

People’s Friend is our third or fourth most popular weekly title – reflecting our demographic.  My sense is that this space in front of the newspapers will work best for titles which already sell well in our shop.

The brilliant cover on the latest issue of Australian Property Investor magazine earns it a good counter location as shown in the photo.

While we are giving away in our newsagency what other retailers charge for – primt counter space – the experience is helping us understand about the covers which work best in our particular demographic and that is good for our business.

Further to my blog post from earlier this week, we refreshed our display of magazines on the approach to our main lottery counter. We have reduced space for the main weeklies and introduced a broader range of titles more likely to appeal to our weekend customers.

The mix you see in the photo today is different to what we would have for next weekend.

While there is a risk that a display like this at the front of the newsagency reduces traffic further into the store, I am certain that it attraacts people walking pact who might otherwise not have entered.

We returned the three copies originally supplied of the Sarah Palin magazine (Historical Collectors Edition) today.  Beyond Sarah being old news (for now), the $21.50 price point and the challenge of where to display the special interest title meant it would fail in all but the most specialist of newsagencies.  We gave it a shot for a month and took it off the shelf today three weeks early.

Thankfully, none were stolen.

I was surprised to see the Super Food Ideas Simply Summer cookbook selling for more than the Super Food Ideas magazine.  $4.95 vs $2.90.  Super Food is a brand which has built a following on a price based offer.

This latest cookbook does not pitch a price based offer and, I suspect, will not connect with the same consumers as the magazine.

That said, we are being inundated with these small format cookbooks at the moment.  All the usual publishers have new titles out plus we are getting stock from publishers not usually in this space.