If newsagents are to maintain (reclaim?) the title of magazine specialists we need to bring our magazine displays up to current standards. While our competitors display full face in most cases, we continue to hide attractive covers in our fixturing. This will only hurt sales.
Here’s the view of this month’s Women’s Weekly from a customer perspective in traditional newsagent racking.
Barely the top third of the title is on display. While you can see what the magazine is, the key value propositions are lost. Browsers are not as enticed as they could be and this affects impulse purchases.
Here’s the full cover of the magazine. Now you can see that it’s Bindy Irwin on the cover and that the magazine comes with a free CD of Christmas music. Both reasons to display the full cover and not the top third.
We are doing high volume titles like Women’s Weekly a disservice by using racking systems which are years out of date.
Shop designers and fitters are doing newsagents a disservice by continuing with such out of date racking systems. They need to lift their game and help newsagents lift theirs.
We carry too many titles to full face display all. What I am planning is to introduce full face racking for the top 25 titles at the counter and a further 250 titles at the high traffic entrance to the magazine area. The rest of the magazines will be displayed in racking which is a step ahead of current racking. The cost of this partial refit will be in the order of $35,000. That’s a high price with magazines generating 25% GP but worth it if I am to be the magazine specialists in the area.
A consequence of bringing magazine display into today’s standards is a cut in the space allocation.