With newsagents selling their newspaper home delivery businesses in unprecedented numbers, publishers and other stakeholders ought to review how they view and engage with the retail newsagent.
A common situation I see is that when a newsagent sells their home delivery round to concentrate on retail, they drop to being a second class citizen in the eyes of the publishers. This does not happen every time but I have seen it enough to record it as a problem. (I note that this has not been my experience – I am commenting of what others have told me.)
I’d like to see the retail newsagent have a robust direct publisher relationship. This is essential is maximum sales are to be achieved. Too often I have seen inadequate support to the retail newsagent for promotions such as DVDs, posters and the like. A direct relationship could avoid this and actually help the newsagent achieve higher sales.
Publishers invest heavily in subsidising home delivery subscriptions. Equal effort spent on the retail network could reap excellent sales growth. Just because I sold my home delivery round a year ago does not mean I care less about newspapers. In fact, the contrary is true – I see the importance of newspapers from a pure retail perspective. This focus is good for the publishers – if they wish to engage more deeply with retail only newsagents.
We have seen first hand the narrow minfded approach of publishers to retail only newsagents. We have just sold our distribution business to concentrate on retail and are now a subagent to another newsagent, we had no say in this at all the publisher refused to give us a retail only direct supply. What they failed to see was that 95% of our sales were retail and only 5% were deliveries. Now that we are only getting reduced commissions we no longer actively promote our newspapers and we do not promote the papers outside our business, this has seen a shift in sales to the only newspaper publisher who remained committed to us and kept us on full commission (APN newspapers have been fantastic). Again all I can say is short sighted thinking only leads to short sighted lifespans.
For Australia read UK, we have no publisher relationship, our supplying wholesaler work to a set of rules that all to often ensure a shortage of copy leading to early sellouts. Of our 3 lead titles we should not sell out, ever but we do.
DVDs, thats a laugh, when ever there is a series of these it gets promotion on the front page but the reader is told to collect it at WH Smith or a supermarket.
It is almost as though we independent news retailers are an inconvienence to the industry, yet we do most of the home delivery and sell a huge slice of the print run.
All we want is to be valued and to benefit from a much closer relationship with publishers. But theres the rub that would cost them money.