Author: Mark Fletcher

The latest issue of British House & Garden came to us sealed in a bag with the current issue of Country Homes & Interiors and 25 Beautiful Homes. We sell all three magazines. The price of the bagged pack is less than buying the three separately. This is a good example of a magazine publisher driven promotion I wrote about last week. While, overall, I like promotions like this, I don’t see the sense for imported publications. This is a very different market than for domestic publications. I suspect that the bagging of the three was not even on the radar of the distributor here.

After what look to me like a couple of challenging months for The Monthly, the magazine has come out with a great looking issue.  The Nick Cave cover is stunning and works particularly well in traditional newsagency fixturing.  This is an excellent example of using the cover to cut through the magazine range in a newsagency.  While the masthead is important, the content of the latest issue is what gets an infrequent reader picking up a title.  we will pitch this title with our newspapers as well as the usual location.  The second location is earned by the stunning cover.

The latest issue of donna hay kids magazine is one of the most successful we have seen.  In less than a month on sale we have sold 80% of our stock.  This title will sell out.  We have driven this result by a good display in our food section and proactive co-location with our weeklies – sometimes on the flat stack and other times in a magazine pocket.

No one asked us to do this extra work.  we did it because it made good business sense based on a great looking cover with excellent visual cut-through.

donna hay kids magazine is a title customers will buy if they know it is out – hence the importance of co-location to drive a great sales result.

Australian Country Collections takes up double the retail space in newsagencies this month because of the copy of an old issue of Life magazine included in the browser unfriendly plastic bag.  I don’t see the value in such lazy marketing – Australian Country Collections is a popular title for us.  It is also popular with browsers.  Bagging the magazine may hurt sales.  Given the success of Life magazine I do not expect it to be a factor in driving sales.

I call this lazy marketing because it is not creative.  Unfortunately, it is one of the most popular marketing tactics used by Australian publishers.

I’d suggest that there are more effective and creative ways to drive sales of this title than bagging it with an old unrelated magazine.  That is what this post is really about – calling on the publisher and other publishers to be innovative in how they seek to drive sales in newsagencies.  Bagging magazines is out of date and encourages waste in terms of unecessary freight as well as for the plastic bags.

Three promotions I would like to see for a title like Australian Country Collections are:

• Sampling.  Give newsagents copies of A5 samplers to hand out to customers.  These should have one or two brilliant articles which showcase the usual content of the magazine.  They should have a box on the back for us to place our business stamp.  Have a welcome note from the editor in which they pitch newsagents as great partners of the magazine – i.e. make this sampler a win win.
• Give away a gift of genuine value.  Promote this on pay TV with a budget conscious campaign.  people need to buy the magazine to get the free gift from the newsagent across the counter.  Make the gift only available from newsagents and promote this on the TV commercial.  This gets our buy in.  Make sure the gift is relevant and valuable. Smart newsagents will seize the opportunity to sell customers into putaways – almost guaranteed sales.
• Co-location reward.  Reward newsagents for sales growth.  This will help fund labour and real-estate involved in co-locating the title in pursuit of new readers.

Each of these ideas is about newsagent and publisher engagement in a common goal.  Bagging a free old magazine is not about this – quite the contrary.

If magazine publishers are to achieve break-out growth, they need to engage in break-out marketing.  An average newsagency will have 1,000+ different titles on the shelves at any time.  That is a lot of noise with which to compete – for newsagent and shopper attention.  Hence the importance of a genuinely break-out campaign.

Magazine publishers doing the same old stuff in marketing their titles train newsagents to do the same old stuff.

Like many newsagents, we have given prime position to the celebration of Vogue magazine’s 50 years. The collateral is excellent, true Vogue style.  The multiple covers are stunning.

The launch of the issue has generated media coverage which should drive interest.

Vogue is an important brand to newsagents as it anchors our fashion segment.  It is a beacon brand around which we can build business for other titles.  The Vogue brand is especially important for those of us who carry editions from various countries.

We will leave this display in place for at least a week – depending on sales.

It is disappointing that newsagents who actively support the title were not given an opportunity to take on the boxed edition.