Pacific Magazines this afternoon announced that free Baby Wildlife Aussie Animal Cards will be available to New Idea readers by way of a coupon in next week’s issue. Customers will need to take the coupon to Woolworths to redeem the free cards.
This is a marketing promotion developed by Woolworths and Taronga Park Zoo. The cards are available with a $20 spend at Woolworths. The cards are also available by redeeming the coupon in next week’s New Idea. No additional purchase at Woolworths is required with the New Idea coupon – this means customers can redeem from the service counter.
While this promotion is likely to drive Woolworths sales to get to the the $20 spend and New Idea sales for the coupon, that access to the gift is only available from Woolworths is disappointing for newsagents selling the magazine.
Pacific people will say that they could have run the coupon only in Woolworths copies – driving sales in their stores. Sure enough, the coupon is in all copies of the magazine, even those going to Coles. However, that a customer buying from me has to go to Woolworths to get the gift is galling. Some newsagent customers will not like this.
The marketing people in Pacific who agreed to participate in the Woolworths / Taronga driven promotion ought to realise that even the smallest action against small business newsagents hurts considerably more because of the actions of other suppliers against us. Just about every few days we hear of another supplier hurting us in some way. To these marketing people I would say – talk to newsagents and talk to the newsagent experts in Pacific next time you consider a campaign that makes us look like second-class citizens compared to supermarkets.
The last thing any publisher wants is where the majority of magazines are sold in supermarkets. That would be a painful world for you.
We are the single largest magazine retail channel in Australia. Many of us treat magazines with respect and actively engage with the category. Actions like this campaign will make some of us wonder. We deserve more respect. We regularly do redemptions
Footnote: My understanding is that Woolworths will not have the cards available until the middle of the week so that will present some challenges for them.
My customers will not drive an hour or so to get to the nearest Woolworths just to get a card.
Mark
If they keep trying to get people to go to the supermarket to get a magazine, I think they will loose sales as I hate queuing up and for one magazine I would go without. Bad enough going there to get what they are suppose to be specializing in (food), even that is a pain under staffed and stuff in the isle to try an make you impulse buy blocking them, and unable to pass another trolley. If I want to buy a magazine it needs to be without any of the above.
that why I buy from newsagents thats what they specialize in.
Mark – Pacific Magazines won the Woolworths General Merchandise Supplier of the Year award on Thursday night. In the comments as to why they won the award it was mentioned it was in part due to their willingness to participate in exclusive promos with Woolworths.
Glad nearest Woolworths is 280k away but will these promotions be promoted to other chains. I was cranky to have to supply local IGA recently and kicked and screamed but I have found they are not selling as many mags or papers as I thought. I wonder if we stress a bit too much. Just what is the real impact.
To add insult to injury I just received an email from G&G pushing this and asking me to actively promote it to my customers. Yeah right,its now my job to advertise Woolworth’s.
Niall I don’t begrudge them working with any retailer selling their product. They are a good supplier and a strong investor in our channel as the nexus platform shows.
I do wish that the redemption of the coupon in next week’s New Idea could have been through newsagents but I understand that choice was outside Pacific’s control.
They should have done both newsagents and Woolworths like newspapers do with Free gifts from Sunday Telegraph from time to time.
But it’s not a Pacifuc run promotion.
You’re right Jeff. The back page of the Sunday Herald Sun has a full page ad promoting the cards.
I will not push Woolworths and Pacific / Gotch should realise this.
Peter so remove all Woolworths ads from your other newspapers and magazines.
This matter was poorly communicated from Gotch. It’s an ad from Woolworths in New Idea and we should treat it as such.
If my memory serves me correctly we visited this very topic last week with special magazine displays for Woolworths. I asked the question then as to why can’t the newsagency channel develop their own marketing strategies along these lines. I also asked if is it possible for the various marketing groups to come together (regardless on wether they are magazine focused) and support across the board, coordinated, promotions by newsagencies for newsagencies. I have witnessed the ferocity that newsagency marketing groups take to each other so I guess I already know this answer. It isn’t pretty and, I feel, is poison to the channel. We need to find common ground for the sake of future.
This said my advice is to buckle up if you have not already done so. These promotions by the supermarkets are well thought out, well planned, and well executed. There will be many more and they deserve the results they get.
Gary, I am a Director of newsXpress and in the past have been a shareholder and member of nextra and a member of Newspower in my 17 years owning newsagencies. While there is commercial rivalry / competition between the marketing groups as there should be, there is no ferocity except when there is gross misrepresentation of facts.
As for them working together, they’d all need to first of all agree on magazines being important. I doubt you will see that.
This topic here is not like the magazine display topic of last week in that the display I wrote about was a magazine publisher initiative. This Toronga Zoo promotion is zoo and Woolworths initiative. It’s very different.
Speaking from a newsXpress perspective, there have been many newsXpress / magazine publisher specific promotions over the years. With all the major publishers.
More broadly, Pacific Magazines runs its excellent Nexus platform solely for newsagents. This is a platform packed with promotions and marketing tools (like free emails and subsidised text messages) that are exclusive to participating newsagents. Bauer has its long-established Connections program. While I don’t have data I would suggest that less than 50% newsagents signed up for Connections and Nexus actually use it.
Publishers will go with groups that encourage newsagent engagement. This is why they struggle to engage a whole of newsagency channel campaign – because the whole channel does not engage as such and never will.
Promotions require discipline and it’s only through commercial agreements that any discipline can be facilitated. This is why associations can’t do anything and it’s why associations fail generally when it comes to magazines.
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