Roy Peter Clark has written an excellent essay published at Poynter exhorting journalists to read newspapers – for the future of newspapers. Clark says journalists are probably out of touch by not engaging with the product they help create.
I wonder if this is true with newsagencies. How much do we engage with our channel as a customer? With the hours newsagents work it can be difficult but it is essential. This experience of shopping other newsagencies might be what we need to navigate our own future.
Clark writes about spending 15 minutes a in the morning reading newspapers and more time in the afternoon on feature articles. If we are to engage with our channel, as a customer, it needs to be as structured.
Mark,
You make a very good point. Putting youself in the shoes of a customer can be difficult in your own store. Realising what you are doing right and wrong is difficult at best, some would argue impossible, by only looking at your own store.
The independant suermarket industry are encouraged to regularly visit competitors to perfrom comp-checks and see what they are doing marketing/merchandising wise. The same should apply to newsagents.
Visiting other stores will help newsagents approach their own store’s activities in a more consumer friendly way. It may be as simply as noting one’s own reaction to something in another newsagency – “as a customer how did i react to that?”. Periodically doing this will help newsagents avoid becomming jaded.