Wellbeing magazine is re-launching with the new issue on-sale this past week. They are hiding the re-launch issue in a sealed plastic bag – so much for encouraging browsing. They are including in this bag an old issue – why do that? To compare the new with the old? In some of the bags I received the old issue is only from two issues ago. Hey, I paid to send these unsold copies back to Universal Magazines, the publisher. Now I am paying to give them space to try and sell this old stock again. The bag is too big to fit multiple copies per pocket. This forces Wellbeing onto the already full flat-stack area. Maybe the publisher is smarter than I think.
The best way to re-launch a magazine is to make it accessible – easily browsed – and to promote it for the future, not by looking back at the past.
We debagged this title along with a few others and are seeing good sales, if the mag companies will not listen to customers who want to browse then I will give them that option. We offer the old issue to the buyer but no one is interested. We did the same thing with Aussie Dirtbike and have all but sold out and again no one wants the “free” mag.
I was suprised when one of our bagged magazines broke and the “free magazine” that they were offering still had the sticker from a previous newsagency – very poor form!!
Lots of the ‘free’ ones do – ATM, we have one that didn’t sell 15 issues ago in Warrina..
Yet they want them all back to go around yet again.
I had a magazine the other day, not bagged, sent to me as a new magazine. It had a sticker from another newsagency that was a few months old. So much for new stock.
I think it is insulting to both us and OUR customers.