The free cookbook which comes with the latest issue of Delicious magazine obscures the cover shot of a delicious pasta dish.
Free mini cookbooks as bonus gifts appear too frequently with magazines now to have the value they once had. This is why I question the covering of Delicious in this way. Will the free cookbook drive enough of a sales increase? I doubt it.
While I am no magazine publisher I wonder why publishers invest in these gifts when investing in a better base product should drive more consistent business. Maybe there is something I don’t get about publishing and driving consumer demand. I know publishers I speak with say that free gifts drive sales. Maybe so but do all these bonus cookbooks work today as they used to?
Show me a compelling cover any day. That’s my retailer perspective.
My rant aside, we are supporting this issue of Delicious with good full cover showing placement.
all of my copies of the current issue went missing and were not delivered…. when i called to report and re-order, they couldnt find any?
i will have none of this title in store untill the next one comes out
Peter, I’ll chase News Magazines for you they should be able to help.
We had a customer want 10 copies. Rang G & G and they said instock should get on next delivery. Did not happen. Rang again – on next delivery. Did not happen. Next call, 3 in Sydney can’t find the stock they thought they had in Brisbane. Finally ended up with the 3 copies 10 days after the initial call. We sold customer Gourmet traveller as an alternative so we had a reasonably satisfied customer but how much better could it have been if the customer had Delicious on the next delivery.
Talking of promotional items what does make a good promotion. Is it somebody asking please can i enter for the chance to win or is it the sales assistant saying to the customer you have bought a card and here is an entry form to enter a competition to win. My feeling is the first yet many of the “promotions” seem to operate on the latter. What is the point of giving away something after they have bought. We want them to buy because of.
I think of the promotions that are run for mothersday and bacjk to school etc where we seem to give away margin for the benefit of volume and more often lose more than we had.