Il Globo, Neos Kosmos and Sing Tao Daily are part of an important category for newsagents. Foreign language titles bring in loyal customers who visit daily or at least several times each week. By intelligently promoting around these titles, and respecting the opportunity their loyalty brings, we are able to make the newspaper purchase quite valuable.
I see foreign language newspapers treated as second class citizens in too many newsagencies. Since they are effectively exclusively to us in many areas we ought afford them appropriate respect. By respect I mean treat their display with some are, make sure you have the product out on time, offer a putaway service, promote the masthead in-store to let people know you are proud to carry the product. This will be noticed by customers.
Good foreign language sales will drive lottery, Western Union business, mobile phone recharge and card sales – based on the sales data I have seen. There is a definite correlation between these departments and foreign language newspaper sales.
I am happy to allocate good retail space and devote management time to foreign language newspapers. They serve me well.