Now this is competition!
This photo shows two convenience stores on George Street in Sydney, next to each other. What makes this direct competition even more surprising is that there are eight other convenience stores within a two minute walk of these two shops.
While Sydney is busy, it feels like there are too many convenience stores. Two next to each other in the photo is extraordinary.
Imagine this type of competitive situation for your business – a retailer next to you selling 80% of what you sell, one the same hours. How do you compete? What differentiates your business from theirs?
Convenience stores have no protection. Suppliers want their products everywhere – for convenience.
I mention this today as there are newsagents who continue to push for protection. I think that is a hard push to make where we see small businesses,like these convenience stores, apparently surviving without any protection.
While there may be other factors in play with these convenience stores, factors beyond the competitive products that help them survive – but such factors are not obvious to me.
Australia Post pitching to newsagents and other retailers
Australia Post has a booth at the Reed Gift Fair in Sydney. While primarily pitching their Startrack delivery service, they are also pitching e-commerce solutions of relevance to retailers running businesses that are relevant to shoppers today. The presence of Australia Post ought to surprise others who should have been at this trade show and who are not.
This trade show is interesting because of some stands that expand the appeal of the trade show and because of some suppliers who ought to be there and are not – also because of the diversity of the retailers attending. The floor of the trade show speaks to changes in the retail channels to which this show appeals.
From where I stand, changes = opportunity = optimism.
Good on Australia Post for having a crack at this trade show.
Sunday newsagency marketing tip: get your suppliers promoting your business
Good suppliers to retail businesses list their retail partners on their corporate websites. Do your suppliers do this? Ask them, if they do not, ask why not? if they do, ask them to list your business.
Whereas years ago there were four or five highways of shopper traffic to a newsagency, today our best traffic is fed by hundreds of streets and lanes.
A good supplier will support you, list your business and help people who like their products find you. This type of marketing support from a supplier is marketing 101, essential in my view.
Sunday newsagency management tip: read your emails daily
This is the most basic of management suggestions to newsagents – read your emails at least once a day, preferably more often.
A newsagent I spoke to last week said they read emails Mondays and Thursdays, because they are the magazine days.
At the very least, read emails daily, preferably through the day or if you must limit it, twice or three times a day.
Otherwise you miss opportunities.
Sunday newsagency challenge: quit tobacco
Tobacco sales are declining in Australia as a consequence of public education and plain packaging. They are declining in most newsagencies from what I can see. Is it time for you to quit tobacco product altogether.
If your sales are under $2,000 a week, you are close to the point at which you are not achieving a sufficient return on investment to justify the space, labour and inventory investment. While I think the health case for quitting tobacco is clear, making it about the financial return makes it a business decision and that ought to be easier to assess for some.
My challenge today is: should you quit tobacco in your newsagency?
Related: I remain shocked the national newsagent association, the ANF, accepted funding from a tobacco company.
Footnote: I quit tobacco products in my newsagency in 1999 declaring that as a business attracting families I felt the category was inappropriate.
Busy start to Sydney Reed Gift Fair
The Reed Sydney Gift Fair is only two and a half hours old and already it is busy. In fact, busier than expected for a Saturday. That show itself, while smaller than most others for the year, is good. I have walked the whole floor and there is plenty to see. Several suppliers are using this show to pitch model line refreshes and extensions in the run up to Christmas.
What is interesting is this is a local trade show – pretty much NSW only businesses, from right across the state.
It is also the sort of show you can do in a few hours and that seems to be appealing.
Unprofessional magazine display at a Coles supermarket shows why they should not get magazines
This photo shows how a Coles supermarket in Melbourne had Country Style magazine shoved into their magazine fixture yesterday morning. It was the second Coles I had been in in 24 hours with this magazine handled this way. This is appalling for Country Style and all magazines as it screams: we don’t care about magazines!
What does the publisher expect? – they sent considerably more volume than the space allocated for the title (because of the free shopping bag packaged with the magazine) and, I suspect, did not pay for extra space in Coles.
Yes, I get that the bag is a free gift and designed to drive sales. All it has done here is facilitate a messy display that disrespects the product.
In your typical newsagency you would not see this. We are more professional at handling magazine issues that require more space than usual for the title. Sure, we complain about it, but we do the work – because we are proud of our shops and how we represent what we sell. Some newsagents store the extra stock in the back room while others shuffle magazines around to accommodate a larger than usual issue.
The irony of the situation is that supermarkets like Coles get more money than newsagents from some publishers to support magazines yet they support the category with less care than newsagents. That is wrong and publishers ought to see it – but they won’t because they think they need supermarkets. More fool them.
Publishers who want their magazines handled professionally ought to quit supermarkets, support newsagents and fund newsagents so we can make a living wage from the category. This would be a win for the publisher and a win for newsagents. It would stop the mess in this photo at Coles, a mess that disrespects Country Style magazine.
What really galls me is the ignorance and arrogance of the publishers behind the MPA trial when they say newsagents need more training. This photo and what I saw in the other Coles show that oles staff need more training.
If you see similarly appalling magazine displays in supermarkets please send photos to me so we can shine a light on this.
Some newsagents make stealing from them too easy
I have had three newsagents call me this week about employee theft. Two were hit by employees they trusted who had worked hard at covering their tracks.
The third newsagent has no regard for cash balancing, no tracking of stock sold, no checking of new stock, no oversight of employee behaviour around the assets of the business and no process cash they take from the register for personal use – in front of employees.
If you want to reduce theft in your newsagency:
- Track everything you sell.
- Re-order using your computer system.
- Regularly check stock on hand.
- Be tight in cash management.
- Have a structured end of shift reconciliation process.
- Don’t take out cash for yourself.
- Check how your staff use your software, look for patterns of fraud.
This list is not new. Sadly, there are newsagents being stolen from today who could stop it if they acted on this list.
Are there consequences for newsagents from Zoo Weekly magazine closing?
With the date of the final issue of Zoo Weekly now set, will we see other titles fill this space? I ask because it has happened before. The locally produced Grazia closed and not long after newsagents started receiving the imported Grazia.
This is not necessarily a bad thing as we found for a while we sold more copies of the imported Grazia than the local title.
With Zoo Weekly, I wonder if a distributor will allocate to newsagents one of the UK lad’s mags. While I can see it happening I hope it does’t as I think that genre has had its day.
Attention to detail drives plush sales
Attention to detail is vital in driving product sales in the modern newsagency. Putting products out on display can work but making products look the best they can is essential.
Take this large graduation bear we have in the newsagency. In the photo taken immediately after he was put on display, he looks okay – nice and big, cuddly, well made. But to me he didn’t look quite right. He looked average, not as alive as I felt he could look, not as appealing to shoppers walking past and glimpsing the display.
I spent a few seconds grooming the bear, around the eyes particularly, and he immediately looked different: alive, more appealing. I hope you can see what I am talking about in the photo – especially when you compare it to the first photo. The face of this bear looks 100% better in my view, more likely to attract shoppers.
This level of attention to detail is vital in retail. Indeed, we have a kit of products we use to refresh products to being them to life – brushes, a hair dryer and more. We use these to make items we sell look more appealing and, through this, to drive traffic and sales.
With sales in the category up well into double digits year on year the attention to detail is paying off. While not the only factor in driving growth, I am certain it is a factor.
This is one area where we have to leave behind being a newsagent and focus on being a special interest retailer as the special interest customers who purchase items that benefit from grooming notice the attention to detail.
Free: take only what you need
Walking near where I live last night I noticed this box and sign outside a food store offering free produce. There was no requirement to make any purchase in-store – the items were truly free, no questions asked. The box was considerably fuller earlier in the day.
It turns out this is a regular service by this food store. Fresh produce and other food items nearing their best by date are placed in the box with passers-by welcome to take what they need.
In addition to offering the free food, the box and sign make a subtle pitch for the business and their generosity.
For me, the box and sign were a reminder of good things people do and, in particular, good things we can do in small business retail.
I am sure there are things we can do in our businesses to help people and that many newsagents do this every day. What I saw last night is an execution that is practical and subtle – inspiring.
Smart use of social media by Tatts
Tatts paid for this promoted tweet on Twitter Tuesday afternoon, pitching tickets in that night’s OzLotto draw. It is their use of the #libspill hashtag that caught my attention as this is the hashtag that had been running hot through the Liberal Party leadership spill and beyond. Hashtags are a factor in determining when proposed Tweets are served by Twitter. What Tatts has done here is remind us of the value of timely targeted Tweets.
Art Therapy update for newsagents
Here is an update from within Gordon and Gotch late yesterday about the Art Therapy partwork:
Part 2 stock was based on their retention curve (the curve of the publisher) but due to the early sales data we presented last week to the publisher they are air-freighting some more stock from the UK today of Part 2 that we need to finish before sending out to cover any back-orders. The publisher has just confirmed to bring forward part 3 supply to next week and we have also managed to secure a bit more additional stock for this issue. We will send a further newsagent update by the end of the week.
The supply situation newsagents are experiencing with this title are a function of supply decisions by the publisher. I feel for the folks at Gotch as they are the servant of the publisher.
To those newsagents complaining about supply – there is nothing new here. We have seen it for years – an amazingly successful partwork for which we cannot get enough stock and where supply drops dramatically as we get deeper into the series. We have to manage the opportunity expecting this, making the most of what we can. This is why I said I think newsagents early returning part one were nuts because they missed the opportunity of leveraging that traffic into other products.
Leveraging Star Wars to drive new traffic for the newsagency
We are promoting the official Star Wars cards and gifts range from Hallmark on the lease line, facing into the mall – leveraging maximum traffic generating potential for the newsagency.
We are also promoting on social media widely around the business – and not only to those who like our social media pages.
Star Wars is tipped by licence experts here in Australia and overseas to generate more sales from now to Christmas than all other licenced products combined.
Early engagement with other Star Wars products that we launched two weeks ago suggests that interest will be massive. We have customers who have prepaid us for official Star wars licenced products that will not arrive for at least another month.
Good licences promoted well in-store and outside the business can be valuable for us not only for the direct sales they generate but also for the other purchases made by those attracted by the licenced product promotion.
I urge all newsagents to embrace licenced product opportunities from a variety of suppliers. Good licences allow you to make a pitch for relevance related to the licence and this is often better than the relevance attached to your shingle.
Be careful about your licence choices as some are duds. Not all licences go as nuts as Star Wars will or Frozen did.
The challenge with licence engagement is the need to engage early. Usually, this is months away from release. In the case of Star Wars, we completed most of our buying by March – we actually started last last year. yes, considerable forward planning is involved.
While being part of an engaged group helps, it is not mandatory. Do your research, watch what is happening in the marketplace, listen to suppliers, be connected with overseas news sources. Know about major opportunities well in advance of them hitting mainstream news here.
Yes, all this is hard work. However, this is where new traffic lives, where our future lives. It is good and rewarding work.
Are newsagents being overloaded with adult colouring titles?
This is now getting ridiculous – more adult colouring titles being sent to newsagents from which we make 25% while access to better quality books from which we make 50% is easy.
Me, I want absolute control over the magazines so I can maximise the higher margin book opportunity over which I have complete control. Yesterday I spoke with a newsagent who is the opposite – they are not ordering any books and taking all the magazines they can get because they are sale or return.
The two choices are right for each of the business owners as the choices reflect their approach to their businesses.
While I say neither of us is wrong in our approach, I think preferring sale or return keeps your focus on likely failure of inventory sent by another party making a decision on what you should stock in your business.
Now more than ever we need to control our businesses. This is why I want absolute control on the adult colouring magazines I receive. I have made and continue to make far more from th adult colouring titles I source for myself. I can also control my exit from the segment, just as I did my entry many months ago.
I worry for the newsagents who take what they are sent by the magazine companies without thinking about this strategically. I think such an approach contains or holds back what they could make from adult colouring. Considering this more broadly, I think it holds them back from reaching for other goals within and through their businesses, goals that sit at the heart of their future.
Our newsagencies are our businesses. They are places where decisions we make ought to be reflected in our performance. Those relying solely on the magazine companies for adult colouring engagement are not running their newsagencies as their own businesses. Rather, they are acting as a drop off point, an outpost, for another business.
This is the difference between a retailer and an agent.
There is no future in being an agent, none whatsoever. While riskier and harder work, there are valuable benefits and opportunities from being a retailer.
The future of every newsagency depends on the leadership team making their own choices, pursuing margin, new traffic, efficiency and business defining opportunities. The future depends on managing the old model – sale or return – while learning and engaging with the new (not really new but new for some newsagents) model of being a retailer going out, finding new stock and purchasing this on a firm sale basis.
Sometimes, a magazine does present an opportunity to work with firm sale stock. The new Art Therapy partwork is a good example. I heard about it, asked for 160 copies and used these to leverage the TV ad generated traffic for the benefit of the large range I have in store of higher margin product. It has been a good win win.
While I do look at the growing range of magazine titles in this space, my main focus remains on the higher margin products including books, pencils, erasers and other items over which I have more control. This is the future of newsagency retail – being an engaged retailer rather than being a good agent.
How small business newsagents could benefit from Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister
Malcolm Turnbull is an explainer, he provides context, he understands the importance of narrative. Whether you agree with his politics or not, and I don’t on a number of policy topics, he at least explains his position in an accessible and considerate way. His approach helps win more to his thinking and lose fewer because of it.
His comments at his first press conference last night about disruption are a good example of what I mean. Disruption is a challenge and an opportunity.
I expect/hope Turnbull as Prime Minister will help Australians feel more confident and optimistic and this will be reflected in small businesses, especially in small business retail, like newsagencies. Our customers will express their optimism and newsagents themselves will reflect optimism in their own business decisions.
The change in Prime Minister decided last night is an opportunity to reset, reboot.
Optimism is more important in small business retail than in national retail chains. This is why I think Turnbull as Prime Minister will be better for us than Abbott. Tony Abbott comes across as a bully. he appears to care little about bringing the electorate with him on views he holds dear. This feeds negativity and encourages pessimism in my view.
So, from where I sit in small business, I think Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will/should be good for business.
From a small business newsagency perspective, today is, hopefully, a good time for us to consider our own business situation in the context of leadership, disruption and opportunities. I think today is an opportunity for us to reset.
Garden magazines respond to co-location in the newsagency
For the last two weeks have been pitching garden magazines in a second location underneath British and women’s general magazines, next to a couple of extra columns of crossword titles. This co-location is designed to get people noticing the titles who otherwise would miss them as they are in another aisle. As you might expect, sales are up.
While space is limited, we do like to move magazines around like this and co-locate small selections when time appropriate. With Spring here, garden titles placed as we have done is sure to work, and it is.
While I appreciate the frustration that magazines do not generate the margin dollars today that we need for growing rent and labour costs, any increase from additional sales has to be good. This is why I recommend newsagents look for opportunities like I have outlined in this post.
Tactical placement of magazines usually generates a more incremental business than any other promotion I run in-store.
Newsagents do not need more ‘leech’ products and services
I met with people in Sydney today who want to introduce a service to the newsagency channel. It is unlike any product newsagents sell or have ever sold. Further, it doesn’t fit with existing categories most newsagents sell. They have little money for promotion. What we need is 1,000 shops offering the service and that will make it successful.
They say they chose newsagents because we are small business people and are more likely to help their small business.
The last thing our channel needs is a service from which we make less than 10% and that relies on leveraging existing newsagency traffic to achieve revenue.
If the service was certain to generate net new traffic maybe and only then if the margin was considerably higher than 10%.
What worries me is that if the people I met today go to one or more of the associations representing newsagents they may get support if there is something it for the association.
We do not need more leech products and services – you know, products and services that rely solely on our existing traffic to be successful. I am not sure newsagent associations see it that way, especially those making decisions on behalf of newsagents who are not themselves newsagents.
Retail businesses in our channel need net new traffic. For the most part, achieving this is up to us, individually in our own businesses – based on our inventory decisions and our out of store marketing.
I do not see evidence that newsagent association folk understand the net new traffic imperative.
Skweek stationery from GNS timely for newsagents
GNS sent me samples from the Skweek range of kid-targeted stationery launched by the business to newsagents this month. The Skweek products are brightly coloured and cover a selection of uses.
Skweek addresses a need expressed by newsagents for some time – giving newsagents something with which to directly compete with Smiggle and similar lines in Big W and K-Mart.
I like that GNS has created a Facebook page for promoting the brand as well as posters and shelf wobblers for in0-store promotion.
I’d encourage newsagents to use Skweek on the lease line, in the front window and online through the school holidays to attract new shoppers.
Here is how one newsagency has implemented the range in-store. The photo is from the Skweek facebook page.
Sunday newsagency management tip: track distance shoppers travel
For a week ask customers you do not immediately recognise for the postcode of their home. Record this and map how far you pull people from to shop in your newsagency. Once you eliminate those in the area n vacation or passing through, such as grey nomads, you can soon get to an understanding of the geographic appeal of what you do. Map this and set a goal to increase your appeal, geographically.
This data will help you approach managing and marketing your business differently.
Sunday newsagency challenge: play dare
Ask everyone who works in your newsagency to come up with a business management dare for you, something that can be done that they are certain will help the business. Get them to write their dares on a small card. read them all. Choose one. Do it, do the dare. Share the results. The team benefits will be far more than the practical benefits from the dare working for the business.