I feel for newsagents on Queensland Country magazine distribution runs who are yet to receive the latest issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Many are finding their local supermarket has stock while they, the competing newsagent, does not. Newsagents are often told how important they are to magazine publishers. This situation with supermarkets supplied while a neighboring newsagent is not demonstrates that words can be hollow.
has anyone seen the big massive magazine display for woolworths , very impressive
Shaun check in tomorrow morning for a blog post about this.
Got to love split deliveries, we sold out at 9am and now have to wait until friday to reload, by then our customers will have started shopping elsewhere for it. We are losing sales through no fault of ours but at the end of the day we still need to pay bills. ACP will get their money regardless because they will bill me for all deliveries this month and then take their time with credits.
we do not get any of ours untill next monday . and then i presume 2 weeks later they come off for the new version of AWW on the 25th ,so we miss out on 2 weeks of sales . well i hope it sells out because i don’t think it will work over lapping 2 issues by 2 weeks
everyone seems to be flowing in after work to get there AWW only to be told that no go untill monday , the normal reply is why , does anyone actually know why this is so ?is it the whole of QLD missing out or is it else where ?
Shaun, here is what I know.
QLD country – Friday.
FNQ, SA, NT, TAS and WA – Monday.
VIC and NSW get the rest of their delivery this Friday.
Hi Shaun S,
We are 1 hr north of Bris on Bribie and received some today (we were cut back by 50% on our normal allocation). Compounding the 50% reduction we were delivered 2 bundles less than the reduced allocation.
We spoke to network, and advised of the shortage only to be told ‘your lying’, and we then proceeded to advise of the 15 different titles we did not recieve…
We asked about more getting more, only to be told you can backorder on Friday…
So I guess someone forgot to tell them there was a wedding on perhaps they should ‘gear up’ for such an event – the silence from ACP is astoudning – 2 f ups in a week…
Cheers
Peter
Our AWW sales have been declining for sometime and I don’t expect extra sales of any of our magazines for the Royal wedding. Our mags just arrived today and there has not been any extra interest. I don;t know what our city cousins have that we don’t. Maybe country people are just laid back and are not interested in the fuss. I have sold extra papers for the Bin Laden stories.
Ok, so we have to wait until friday for this mag, the most frustrating thing is the customers have seen this all over morning TV saying it is on sale today. Maybe an extra few seconds explaing that Regionally this is not the case would have helped. On the upside we have taken plenty of names for copies to be put away come Friday.
Just digressing for a moment.
Alan, when you take names do you find that most ppl do actually collect their saved magazine when it is available or have they bought elsewhere in the meantime ?
Lance, yes if you collect a non refundable deposit.
I’d like to know what the actual problem is.
As it is, it’s published a week late, which has frustrated our customers.
Then it’s a distribution issue? WTF?
The issue has sold better than anyone expected, leading to sell outs on day one. There was also a problem on the NSW/QLD border where some supermarkets got stock while newsagents did not. ACP moved quickly to address this though.
I meant, what is NDC’s problem in the first place? Everything is wrong with this edition, from publish date (wedding notwithstanding, although it would have been nice to have been advised), to distribution.
I think that their intentions were honorable, trying to make the most of the wedding opportunity. AWW is a tough magazine to produce, large in size and print run. Any change to that is going to cause pain.
Lance, we have taken the contact details of the customers. Whilst we did not take a deposit for this title i dont forsee getting stuck with any.
Well you can feel for us in the west too, no stock til next week, very annoyed customers who keep telling me that rellies over east have theirs, and why don’t I have stock!! This is ridiculous! And if its selling as well as you say, we’ll have buckleys of getting extra stock.
Should be interesting tomorrow……79 AWW and only 11 New Idea wedding specials coming in. hhhhmmmmm…..opportunity lost for New Idea???? I think so.
A very smart man explained to me the reasoning behind the supply numbers for the New Idea Wedding special and i must apologise to Pacific mags for my previous post and thank the person in question for his help and information regarding this.
Alan, can you tell us what the “smart man” advised as I have a conspiracy theory about why we are constantly being left “undernourished” with mags we want and “fattened up” with goods that are deserving of disrespect e.g. wild boar hunter etc etc.
The marketing opportunity with the wedding was absolutely not managed well.
In our own centre we were the only shop that wore tiaras and I also supplied them to the shops around us and it generated much laughter and bonhomie. I made the men bow and the women curtsy when they came to the counter and if they didn’t comply I said “off with his/her head”. We had a lot of fun and we had an excellent trading day only to lose all
the goodwill on Monday by having no AWW when the national promos were all over TV for AWW and we looked like the poor relations because we are not getting them until next week.
You would think that a national marketing ploy would take these things into account.
I suggested to our own centre management marketing “gurus” that we could have had a “royal wedding” in our mall but that fell on deaf ears too.
Maybe marketing gurus are not all they are cracked up to be????????????
G`day June, at 1st i was a little perplexed by the supply levels too but Pacific apparently were very cautious on a cuople of fronts. !. they were very aware that their is a lot of Wedding publications being delivered at the moment. 2. they also noted that the New Udea Special had a price point of $9.95. 3. I suppose with all of us Newsagents crying tears of blood lately about oversupply and the detriment this is having on a lot of our businesses they may have been a little careful with this one. June lets hope that if point 3 is true that they may carry this over into normall day to day operations. I suppose at a time like this Distributors are probaly going to be “damned if they do and Damned if they dont”
On a side note i love your marketing ideas and yes it is a real pity that “shopping centre marketing gurus” dont get it.