We have been promoting the free Harry Potter Collector Album which comes with the Herald Sun today this week with this display behind the counter. It’s big, bold and generating plenty of comment.
You can’t miss this from inside or outside the newsagency. We appreciate the help from the folks at the Herald Sun in organising this. Talk about creating some retail theatre!
Yes, I know that I bang on here about the slim margin from newspaper sales. I also write about and appreciate the traffic which newspapers generate for us. They remain a very important product for newsagents, especially when you see promotions like that which starts today with the Herald Sun.
For the first time in a long time we are taking orders, – prepaid only- , for a newspaper promotion. Customers must present thier tokens to collect. This will create traffic, interest in the store and if it works we’ll do it more often.
Mark, the display looks great, where on earth did you source the main poster from.
H&WT.
The POS sent out to agents is top quality.The huge posters and stands really make this easy to promote.
Hopefully there is enough stock to go around this time.
I think this will exceed any other HWT promotion.
Our orders already streaming in. Big wraps to HWT for organising fantastic POS material.
Mark, well done on the display. As a retail only agent it is a credit to you to go too such lengths to promote something you recieve so little for. I just wish that newspapers would recognise the work that retail only agents put in and reward them with better commission.
We have approached this promotion very enthusiastically (as we did the Football card promotion). We have created displays. We have delivered flyers to our 850 home delivery customers. We have created displays with the stock and our own collaterally.
And we have made a generous allocation of stock to our opt-in sub agents. (Which is actually quite time consuming and tedious to set up properly in Tower)
In short we have allocated a lot of space time and energy to what is actually a very low margin / return exercise.
Sales wise it’s going really well, so far. We’re expecting a news paper sellout. (being regional we can’t get replenishments)
Unfortunately until now we didn’t know what we didn’t know.
The POS provided by HWT is nothing like what you have got. We have only 2 counter units and 2 x A1 posters from them.
We’re feeling very disgruntled about this right now.
Next email will be to HWT. ;-(
Great display! We are also promoting this in store with a fantastic selection of POS supplied by News Qld. Bit slow on the uptake this morning, but expecting this promotion to be huge. Also, promotion on radio has been fantastic this morning!
KMC call your rep. I am sure that they are expecting calls for extra inventory today.
Mark thanks for the tip. We will do that. I am more concerned that despite our committment we have been treated rather shoddily with the allocation of the good POS material.
Uptake has been less than I thought here with only 25% of promo stock for the day gone so far. Staff are all dressed up and good display but only minor interest. Mind you we did sell out of papers at 11.30am. Request for extras at 7.30am this morning met with “none available” as per usual. A lot of unhappy customers since who can’t get a paper.
We sold out of papers a while ago but Coles have lots available. This happens everytime there is a good promotion like this. When will the Herald Sun learn to back these promotions with more papers for the newsagents, at least we have plenty of the promotional stock….but we are only supposed to supply it with papers that we don’t have…go figure.
I don’t appreciate carrying the promotional stock on Coles behalfe which is effectively what I have done for half the day.
Brendan…I knew this would be big with all the publicity around the movie, so I increased my newspaper order accordingly. What did you increase your order by?
Ted this is the challenge for retail only newsagents, we rely on the distribution agent to do this for us.
It all looks great. We had big plans but no stock arrived?
Great display.
It’ll need to be a ball tearer of a promo to make up for the lost sales in the week leading up to it.
It’s hard to sell papers when they arrive after you’ve opened to the public, because the Tele driver is busy sorting boxes of promo stock at each drop on his run.
This partcularly affects agencies like mine that have a large proportion of shift workers. If the papers are late to me, they are then very late to my ten subbies.
The extra sales from the “free chips” promo on Sunday barely made up for the lost sales on Thursday when the papers were delivered late due to the promo stock (chips) being on board.
Anyway, I’ll just log my concern, make a file note for the impending day of reckoning on home deliveries, and work my arse off to ensure the Harry Potter promo is a success.
The Harry Potter promotion starts in NSW this Sunday. It should be a good one as long as stock is adequate and supply numbers are consistent. Just getting it set up on POS and I noticed that the Album on day 1 is packaged in a way that obscures the bar code, hence preventing scanning. So if you want to use your POS system to monitor stock (even though Day 1 is “free” with the paper), you have a problem. The simple solution is to get it set up in your data base and then have a barcode label on a card at your counter, or place a hot button on you POS screen. But it is frustrating that the supplier would allow such a mistake to occur.
Harry Potter has finished in SA and was a resounding success except for the fact that it took the first week of sold/outs and whingeing before we could get extra supplies for the second week. Having to say no to a customer because we had no papers left was ridiculous because they just went to the local coles next door and purchased it so we made next to nothing the first week.
However, it was an excellent promo and there was plenty of promo gear available here.
Sorry should have read sold out of papers (not HP stickers/wands.
Should check my emails b4 I send