The death of Michael Jackson, and Farrah Fawcett to a lesser extent, this morning makes an already intense trading week busier for newsagents. It’s a good thing.
The $90 million Oz Lotto jackpot has resulted in considerably increased traffic since Wednesday morning. The news today will take that further as people turn to the brands (newspapers and magazines) they know for coverage. When they purposefully set out to purchase a newspaper or a magazine, more will head for a newsagency. While some may say that is wishful thinking, our recent experience in Victoria with bushfire coverage showed this to be the case.
The key is for us to make the most of these converging opportunities – with special offers and promoting of categories we handle well. This is our opportunity to remind people of our relevance.
The intensity of the Michael Jackson story was demonstrated by the Gold Coast Bulletin publishing a special issue delivered to newsagents around lunchtime today. We received a special edition of the Herald Sun mid afternoon.
Thank goodness its school holidays, all of our youngsters are on next week. I am anticipated 2K customers a day next week.
The Michael Jackson edition was an interesting study in how quickly the media can respond to news. It seems to me that, with the demise of the afternoon edition of so many papers these days, the swiftness of the Bulletin’s actions was indeed a surprise. How quickly we forget what ‘s possible.
One thing, though. We didn’t sell any more papers than usual from that effort. Maybe we could have if they were more thorough, and also provided a cage headline poster.
If the weather was more stable, we could have used a front page ourselves, I guess. Bugger. Only thought of that this morning.
Mark, I believe the GCB special edition went to distribution agents only. I didn’t recieve them nor did the other Newsagents around me.
I had three customers complain to me that they couldn’t find a “Newsagency” anywhere which had the special edition which was advertised moderately on the wireless.
Interesting Michael. In Victoria, I know that retail only newsagents received the Herald Sun – we did.
We are a retail only newsagent on border and received the bulletins around 1pm. Can’t say we sold any extra but it was an interesting exercise and customers were impressed.
What my HWT rep told me was that only newsagents in large shopping centres received them (including subagents).
We did not receive any, but HWT dropped them off directly at one of our sub-agents in a large shopping centre.
Mark
We achieved record Tatts sales in th e week ending Sunday. The sales were quite extraordinary. Being absent from the store in the last week has shown me that we were not able to take advantage of the extra traffic to increase News sales. I am back tomorrow and will see what we can do to improve this. Any suggestions appreciated.
Rowan, Go back to the posts from last week and the week before. Click on lotteries to the right ==>. There are ideas there. the key is traffic management and engagement.