Newsagents doing Back to School should get their hands on an Officeworks BTS catalogue for when they do a post-season review. At 64 pages, the Officeworks catalogue is comprehensive. You read it thinking you’ll find what you need. The design connects with the marketing collateral in-store from the display to the posters to the dump bins. It all visually connects in an entertaining and compelling way.
The catalogue also pitches in an accessible way. For example on pages 22-23: Books to help young students learn and grow. This focuses on the outcome. It’s a clever and engaging pitch. On pages 10-11 the pitch is: All the tools for big ideas. Again, smart. then, on pages 60-61: File and store all their big ideas. The narrative is clear and encouraging.
Officeworks supports creativity and helps you as a parent to help your kids with their big ideas and then helps you store them for the future.
I’m not here to champion Officeworks but rather to draw your attention to this competitor and to recognise that they did BTS well this year. Our channel can learn from this.
To implement this year’s BTS catelogue, I took 7 hours to correct one of my simplest mistake.
I imported the BTS catelogue into my POS and mistakely into BTS 2014. POS created 124 duplicated SKUs as these items already exists in last years BTS catelogue. POS also creates 55 incorrect SKUs as our supplier provide incorrect or missing barcodes for new items.
After POS data is corrupted by my mistake, I manually merge the duplicatd SKUs into the exsting ones, and went to manufacturers’ websites to download over 30 factsheets, then correct the inner barcodes and unit barcodes for new items. Our distributor should do some homeworks to save us some hours.
This year’s BTS catalogue also has some mistakes which mixed the inner (pack) barcode with unit barcode.
After the 7 hours correction, then I tried to implement something learn from some best BTS newsagents to create an education book price sheet, another 7 hours. I have to log in our distributor’s website to obtain cost information, compared our competitors pricing and our sales history, and determine the special price, and then import these 30+ SKUs into BTS catelogue.
I always have two impossible wishes, First, the best newsagencies share their promotional catelogue file with all errors corrected and essential items (not in supplier catelogue) implemented. Second, the distributor make an error-free promotional catelogue.
How about the distributor can pay for the promtional catelogue (tested and error-free) and give it to all average newsagents for free.