It has just gone 9am in Queensland and many newsagents have already exhausted all of their stock of the National Geographic DVD which comes with today’s Sunday Mail newspaper. I have heard of customers abusing the newsagent when it is Queensland Newspapers at fault. They should not run a promotion unless they have sufficient stock for all newsagents. Even one newsagent being out of stock by 9am on the first day is enough to label this a mess.
When the Herald and Weekly Times ran this National Geographic promotion in Victoria last year my experience was that stock availability was good. It worked for us and the newspaper brand. This does not help Queensland newsagents, many of whom have a day of frustration ahead.
News Ltd lets each state handle these things. For years they have known of problems with promotions in some states yet they do not intervene. In the meantime, newsagents and consumers lose out.
So what can we do, instead of complaining about it. These issues are important but never get addressed. NANA, QNF need to get involved and sort out this mess. The telegraph has a dvd collection starting next sunday, it never ends.
As I mentioned on the other Blog Post, there is more to this than just mismanagement.
We received 100 DVD’s for 1,000 papers, and 200 covers… The CD’s were gone by 6.52am…
This is a scam to drive customers out of the Newsagents channel and into direct supply of QLD Newspapers. If you read the flyer, they are ignoring their distribution channel and want to supply the CD’d direct to delivery customers, thus bypassing the need to pay commissions.
The last Nat Geo promotion we had 200 putaways for customers, let alone walk ins… After much negotiaion, we did get out quota increased and managed to fulfill all orders. Not this time… A flat no was all we got…
However, its not hard to do the math (ignoring the effect on customers) to understand the rationale for over promotion and under supply. Last time, we had 200 firm putaways which equated to app $6,000 in revenue. This time, we cannot put any away.
If we assume that 50% of my putaways go through QLD Newspapers as I cannot supply, they (QLD Newspapers) have an additional $3,000 in revenue that they dont have to pay commission on. Multiply that by the number of agents and numbers are rather large.
This coupled with their continual attacking of home delivery base and providing exisiting 7 day customers with special deals ansd then getting them to pay direct are all efforts to take our foot traffic away.
What can we do???
provide the mobile telephone number of your rep and give it out to those customers that have small brains but big tempers
To rub additional salt into open wounds one of customers came back and advised that a Newsagency less than 2KM in a major shooping centre had ‘Box Fulls’ of the free DVD’s still left at 12.00…
Makes it hard to belive how two Newsagencies with similar paper sales receive vastly different quantaties of the free DVD’s… By must customers estimates, they would have rceived 5 times the quantity we received…
I know we need to support our “local Newsagent”, but not when ite me having to refer my customers there…
Did any one notice the back page of the telegraph free recipe book yesterday.
New home delivery customers would get 3 months subscription to Delicious Mag and another I have forgotten name of. As a retail only newsagent we were shooting ourselves in the foot by giving out, so we didn’t actively promote we had it, only if the customer asked.
The 10% commission we receive on these promos is a joke.