Author: Mark Fletcher

Sometimes you have to break the magazine display rules to drive sales.  They do this really well in our Frankston newsagency by placing fashion titles targeting a young reader with teen magazines.  These titles work better in this location than in the women’s magazines aisle – how often do you see a teen or ealry twentysomething girl look in the fashion segment for magazines?

What our Frankston team does is a good example of the value of breaking rules sometimes.

We selected Cosmopolitan for our prime counter display today because of the free Impulse scent with the magazine.  We only received one poster so we had to improvise.  The Just In bookmark has been included to try and draw more attention to the display.

I like how the Impulse offer with Cosmopolitan is attached to the magazine – at the lower left corner.  This makes displaying the title easier and does not take up the space you often find with gifts.

Most magazine publishers prefer their titles to be displayed on the flat stack- the flat shelf at the base of the magazine display.  It is the only place, in traditional magazine fixturing, where the whole front cover is on display. Publishers prefer this because they think this is where customers look.  Newsagents regularly receive bulletins from publishers and magazine distributors asking for this location.

Some publishers even go as far as asking merchandisers to move their magazines to the flat when in-store.  This creates tension in some retail situations – it is the retailer’s shop after-all.  (Merchandisers should not move stock without permission from the newsagent.)

My observations are that the majority of customers navigate to an area of a shop by what they see at or close to eye-level.  Once they are in the area they want, around 70% browse by what is in the fixture and 30% browse by the flat stack.

While this will vary from newsagency to newsagency, I think it is a mistake for p[ublishers to primarily focus on the flat stack when guiding newsagents as to product placement.

We are enjoying success with food magazines so we decided to leverage this with a display at the front of our newsagency, where people entry to purchase lottery tickets.  We have have included a selection of titles from the Better Basics (which is almost sold out) to the monthlies and a selection of ACP Cookbook titles.

We will leave this display up for the weekend and assess its value to us on Monday.  We like to change this display at the front of the newsagency regularly as it is a window on the business.  We choose the categories to promote based on sales movement we see.

The VTAC Guide went on sale in our newsagency this morning – an in newsagencies across Victoria.  We have a display next to our main newspaper stand – it will remain here for a couple of weeks.  We are opportunistically chasing impulse business in addition to destination business for this title – hence the prime location placement.

The cover of the VTAC Guide has excellent visual cut through, better than recent years.  This is another reason for prime-location placement. We are expecting good sales.