I spoke at an industry conference last week about the shopping basket analysis data I’ve been collecting and analysing. The presentation was a call to arms for newsagents — proposing that they better measure their businesses and take a more professional approach to business operation.
Here are my closing words:
Our businesses are icons. We were created in the 1800s to distribute newspapers and magazines such as The Bulletin. We have a proud history and a deep community connect. Our future lies in tapping that community connect, focusing locally and standing for something.
Where our competitors think that big is beautiful and that one size fits all we like our independence, we like being local. We are standard bearers of Australian culture and that’s something to be proud of.
To ensure we have a bright future, we need to plan for it and to plan for it we need to measure and understand. Then we need to execute as business people, leading our businesses rather than working as if on a production line. Most of all we need passion. Being a newsagent is not a job, it’s a profession. Professional newsagents build better businesses and there’s data to prove it.
Newsagents need suppliers to treat them as professionals and to trust them. Part of the reason newsagents are traffic rich and efficiency poor is that suppliers demand control of the freeway to their product at all costs to more efficient use of the traffic they generate. For example, newspaper publishers have rules about what can be advertised news newspaper product, lottery companies have similar rules. If they worked with newsagents and with each other they could achieve incremental sales. There is data which supports this.
Beyond working on a more integrated approach to cross category selling, newsagents and their suppliers would also benefit from better use of the core point of sale technology. (I note that I own a business which is a major player in providing point of sale software to newsagents.) Whereas today lottery products are sold on separate terminals, by integrating this category with existing point of sale equipment it would be easier for newsagents to up-sell non lottery customers and herein lies an excellent business opportunity. The same is true with bill payment. We have separate devices for this and could be better served if our point of sale registers provided the tools.
While I am aware of some progress in this area, it’s crucial that all suppliers to newsagents study the traffic patterns and counter operation as greater co-operation would make achieving real sales growth easier. We ought to decide that the existing sales point is the business focus and build all new initiatives/technologies around that.