Author: Mark Fletcher

Steve Denham is running a good campaign on behalf of newsagents and independent retailers on the issue of sale of tobacco to underage customers.  He is lobbying politicians and regulators in pursuit of fairness for all retailers of tobacco products and not just a focus on bricks and mortar businesses, particularly the easy target independents.

Newsagents in Australian states with tougher regulations would do well to read about Steve’s engagement on this issue.

VANA announced to its members last week the launch of private label copy paper. They say this is part of their move to provide newsagents with what they call home branded products.

Smart private label strategy needs to be well thought out.  The book, Private Label Strategy, makes some excellent points about this, points which appear to have been missed by the people in VANA behind this move.

In their email to newsagents announcing their new paper, VANA said, in part:

VANA believes that this will provide better margins for Newsagents while promoting our own industry product and not other labels.

This will provide control quality and most importantly build our own brand, based around a popular symbol that identifies Newsagents.

Consumers are less likely to care about newsagent branded paper than they are about brands they know and trust, brands which are promoted regularly on television and in other media.  Brand is key after all.  Newsagents cannot compete with the money behind Reflex for example.

How does VANA’s private label strategy “control quality”  What is wrong with the paper we sell today?  If we buy cheap paper we deserve the consequences.

Then there is the comment from VANA about “a popular symbol which indentifies newsagents”.  Are these people living in fantasy land?  The symbol they are using on their paper was announced by the ANF at their last conference in May 2008 and little has happened since.  The ANF can’t get their business partners to use the new logo let alone newsagents. The majority of newsagents using an N logo use the old art work.

The N, the old version and the new version, is dead as a brand symbol.  It counts for nothing.  It is nonsense for VANA to say that it has any value around which they can build their paper offer.  I am not aware of any professional market research which supports consumer perception about the N.  Maybe VANA could publish the evidence on which it has based its comments.

Stationery manufacturers spend a lot of money building their brands. We will do our businesses a disservice if we ignore their brands and try and get up a private label strategy.  Next time VANA asks a stationery brand to support a conference or other initiative they should say no because VANA is just as likely to compete with them.  VANA’s announcement is certainly a warning to suppliers that their national brands are not as important as this brand into which VANA appears intent on pouring newsagent funds.

You cannot unify a channel of 4,500 independent retailers around a copy paper brand.  Indeed, such a move should be toward the end of a project to univy such a retail network and not at the beginning.

Associations should get their association offer right before they head into areas they don’t understand.