No wonder newsagents are losing stationery sales. Floppy disks are one of the products to be featured on a flyer being sent out on behalf of newsagents next month. While floppy disks sell occasionally, they do not sell sufficiently to justify prime promotional space in a brochure or shelf space in my shop. We need to promote current branded product at keen prices – not yesterday’s product which few people use.
What are floppy disks? 😉
GNS have a MAJOR marketing/merchandising problem. There is simply too much crap they are promoting that is either out of date or bordering on being a small niche product.
Even the CD’s/DVD’s on the front page. CD, although not out of fashion yet, are quickly making their way there. And 10pks? Why not market a larger pack and promote bigger purchases?
And a shredder … we definatly wont have people banging dowm our door for them. They are one off purchases. There should be products there that encourage people to come back (habit based).
It’s things like this that only rehash to consumers that newsagents are 10 years behind the likes of Officeworks, Harvey Norman, Target & Kmart when it comes to our product offering. I would love to meet the person that decided that floppy disks were a good product to be given prime position on a stationery brochure.
Why not add a slate and slate pencil you never know they may come back in to use, since we have gone all environmental and don’t want to waster paper. 🙂
I agree with ben while the majors are offering cheap printers that will lead to ink sales, we offer shredders. Get up to speed GNS. If you need help on what to stock how about asking us what we want. We have owned a newsagency for 18 years and have never been asked what we sell by GNS or what we would want in a catalog.
Just shows how far behind the times GNS are. Maybe they have excess stock of floppy disks and need us to clear them? I have been here for over 4 years and have used one. 🙁
GNS certainly need to become market leaders and innovators with regards to stock and promotions but news agents are also damaging themselves by splintering their marketing power with so many small and exclusive buying groups. How can we compete with true national competitors such as Office Works, Australia Post and so on when we weaken our presence in the market place by fracturing our marketing power with smaller, exclusive marketing campaigns. Opportunities to show a united front are being squandered and keep us second rate to the large nationals. We need to have a say in future GNS promotions but must then fully support these promotions to ensure that they work. It would also be great to have some co-operative promotions were a number of our suppliers jointly backed some promotions. Imagine for example GNS, Hallmark and one or two gift suppliers including a range of products into a Christmas promotion. It would be huge and more diverse than current promotions and should allow more avenues for strongly promoting such a sale.
Brendan,
Im not sure what you mean by smaller, exculsive marketing campagins?
Im not sure that newsagents need a say in furture GNS promotions. By all means GNS should take on feedback and develop better communication systems between newsagents and themselves, but they essentially need a whole new outlook on how they operate in terms of their merchansiding and marketing offerings.
I agree it would be great to have cross supplier/department promotions, but i think it need to come from marketing groups and franchises.
Brendan,
Im not sure what you mean by smaller, exculsive marketing campagins?
Im not sure that newsagents need a say in furture GNS promotions. By all means GNS should take on feedback and develop better communication systems between newsagents and themselves, but they do need a whole new outlook on how they operate in terms of their merchansiding and marketing offerings.
I agree it would be great to have cross supplier/department promotions, but i think it need to come from marketing groups and franchises.