I took a close look at the BUY ONE GET ONE HALF PRICE offer for Bauer Media titles in Woolworths yesterday, if the Park Street Sydney store.
You only have to look at the in-store promotion to understand the damage this Woolworths exclusive promotion could do to the sale of Bauer titles in newsagencies.
Why Bauer would fund this promotion for Woolworths is beyond me. Well, I guess not actually since they were probably put under pressure by Woolworths.
Here is a photo of the magazine department. Your eyes are drawn to the orange collateral for the offer as you approach the display.
Now take a closer look. here is how The Australian Women’s Weekly is being promoted.
The message is clear side on and front on. Now look at Woman’s Day:
Again, a clear message, which I get since the goal of the promotion is to drive incremental purchases of Bauer titles. The question is whether Bauer wins at the cost of other publishers. Bauer would win from this but maybe not the retailer.
Off location is this floor unit:
This promotion will run a total of three months. That is three month of preferential pricing for Bauer titles in Woolworths. I suspect newsagency businesses located near Woolworths will suffer from this. If my business was affected I;d be unhappy with Bauer and taking the matter up with the company.
This promotion looks like Bauer wants to migrate shoppers from other channels to Woolworths. While I expect the folks at Bauer would disagree, the facts speak for themselves – a compelling offer, exclusive to Woolworths.
It surprises me why any supplier supports a retailer like Woolworths when they don’t engage with the category like you see in most newsagencies. I guess only big businesses understand big businesses. Time till tell how that pans out for them.
Magazines are important to our channel. Indeed, they are more important to us than they are to Woolworths. Yet Woolworths gets the deals. They are able to say magazines are cheaper there than in newsagencies – why should shoppers shop with us when we are more expensive? For discretionary purchases price does matter.
I have seen people sit and read whatever magazines they need for hours and put it back and go from this store like a council library.
All I can see is a lot of double and triple facings and a heap of empty spots no order to it at all . To me it looks like they have also cut back on range and are spreading mags out as much as possible to cover the space that was once full of magazines .
Shaun the magazines look depleted because these photos were taken Wednesday night.
Maybe because I own a small business I do not understand how big business works but why would you actively train your customers into thinking your product is overvalued and actually worth less than its price!
And they wonder why Newsagents are reducing magazine ranges.
Chris Woolworths motivation is to crush their opposition , in this case its magazines and therefore Newsagents
It tells us two things.
If you are relying on your magazine department to for traffic flow and revenue this is likely to be just the start of this activity and you need to need to look for an exit or downsize of your reliance on the category if you haven’t already.
There is obviously ALOT more money available that the publishers haven’t been willing to make available to newsagents. 25% commission is no longer enough by a long shot. If they can afford to do this they can afford to pay me 40% commission.
If my Bauer titles listed in the above pictures aren’t selling at their regular rates by mid month they are all going back early in large quantites because it’s obvious that this may bastardise some sales.
Hi Mark R,
That’s fine with me. I love a battle with the big boys. My only gripe is the deals Bauer do with them compared to us.
Bauer needs to understand I won’t support them unless they support me in a fair way.
Plus if you are a supplier wouldn’t you know by now that if you are reliant on Coles and Woolies then you are pretty much stuffed!
Thank god for specialty magazines, they are our future in this particular space.
Bauer has no respect for newsagents when they do this to us so don’t give prime space to their titles.
Promote quality not quantity, become a specialist store for magazine lovers.
Chris I agree 100% obviously Bauer have a financial arrangement with the 2 large supermarket chains to pay for the premium space the occupy
I suspect there are newsagent people in Bauer who are disappointed Bauer is favouring one retail brand over all others with this promotion. This will ultimately cost Bauer sales in my view.
There will be a lot of Bauer’s magazine early return this Monday from my shop. Just in time for the cut off date.
Don’t you think, we only need to keep the very minimum stock level from Bauers publication while this promo is happening?
Specially for the newsagent that located very close to Woolworth.
Why should I display Bauer related stock in my shop, that I have to paid a full rents everymonth?
I don’t think it is a smart move to respond to this post by changing how you manage magazines in your newsagency. If you are a good retailer you will already manage magazines well. Keep doing that.
Woollies and Coles are not silly. They know 350 newsagencies shut last year and another 350 will probably close this coming year [me included]that can equate to a lot of new foot traffic. Since our local supermarket shut its doors I have noticed a steady decline in magazine and newspaper sales as people travel 25ks to shop at the nearest supermarket. As the majors lose more trade to the likes of Aldi etc, they are only too happy to pick up extra revenue. I cannot wait to see Bauer get burnt and they WILL get burnt as then they will realise how good the newsagency channel has been for them.
This was in “The Australian” Newspaper yesterday in case no one saw it…http://www.adnews.com.au/news/bauer-media-in-talks-to-buy-pacmags
I had not seen that Mark. The title closures and sales this year leave 2016 as a year of extraordinary change on the magazine front.