The Age has pitched an exclusive subscription offer to participants in Run Melbourne, a half marathon (and other distances) event on June 28. They are offering 20 weeks of Monday to Friday home delivery of The Age for $70, less than half price. I don’t mind this offer since they are not using retail sales to promote it.
Green Living magazine launched around six weeks ago has performed well for us. 85% sell through in five weeks. We had Green Living in a prime position, located next to Better Homes and Gardens. It was in a column with four other green titles in the same column. Hopefully, the success we have experienced with the first issue will continue – this is one of the better magazine launches.
Australian Business Solutions is not performing for us. We are lucky to sell one copy per issue yet the distributor (Network) has increased supply. We have supported the title with a good location, tried co-location and also promoted with posters. It is time to cut our losses and quit the title. I wonder if sales are impacted by sameness of covers. Look at the two issues in the photo. Regular browsers will struggle to notice a difference unless the take the latest issue out of the display pocket and look at the whole cover.
We are planning to replace the purpose built newspaper stand at our Frankston newsagency with a smaller footprint unit on castors. Something along the lines of the Bartuf unit in the photo which they developed for the WH Smith group in the UK. We have been using a larger mobile unit at our Forest Hill location for years but that is too big for what we need today – and it does not support the variety we now want.
The unit we ultimately go with will be strong, flexible, movable and able to display multiple categories: newspapers, magazines, confectionery and even a line of greeting cards for special promotions.
It is changes like this, at the core of our businesses (the newspaper stand) where newsagents need to begin the transformation. While some publishers may push back on these changes, time will show that they will not lose sales.
We installed our first flexible and movable stand at Forest Hill around nine years ago when we were required to have a purpose built stand. We were given permission and agreed to change if sales were affected. They were not. Our stand stayed. In the meantime many newsagents were forced to build a boat anchor of a stand which can be used for nothing else.
There are rules we need to break. There are fears we need overcome. The newspaper stand is a good place to start.
Now for something completely different, a song about Rupert Murdoch written and performed by Jill Sobule at the All Things Digital Conference:
We have a small selection of animal themed wrapping paper on the table with our animal themed jigsaw puzzles. While this is common in major retailers, it is less common on newsagencies. We have achieved good success with suggesting items which go together – like the wrap in the photo. This approach works especially well in the gift area where gift offers are themed.
The team at our Watergardens store has cleverly used heart shaped post-it notes from 3M in the Girlfriend display which faces into the mall. Both magazine and post it notes are available for purchase – and they appeal to the same demographic. It is great to have team members using their initiative to put products together in this way. It’s more important to our business than an attractive yet single purpose magazine display.
There is an interesting story at xinhuanet about the growth in ethnic media is the US in the face of declines being experienced by mainstream US outlets. I have noted here for some time that foreign language newspapers outperform capital city dailies in terms of year-on-year same-store sales growth in newsagencies. On a year to date basis in my own newsagencies I am seeing double digit growth in foreign language newspapers.
Foreign language newspapers are an excellent opportunity for newsagents.
We have gone out early with increased promotion for the OzLotto jackpot and it is paying off – we would usually wait for the jackpot to reach $25 million. It has been a considerable time since Oz or Powerball jackpotted and we figured a $20 million division one prize was worth promoting as since lottery sales have been patchy. The result was an immediate lift in sales. No surprise there.
What is surprising is the comments from regular customers who had no awareness of Oz reaching $20 million. Oz is one of those games customers drift in and out of based on the jackpot level. Non-regulars take little notice of the posters we and other retailers put up each week charting the new jackpot. It has taken a string of balloons and a sign above the entrance to get their attention.
Our (secret) hope is that Oz does not go off for a few more weeks. We have plans to intensify the promotion as the jackpot climbs – to fight store blindness.
The HOT Ink! ink and toner campaign which started a week back is working very well for us. Sales have been fantastic – brilliant yesterday! The brochures distributed to homes and businesses around our centre are generating good traffic including plenty of new customers. The brochure shows us as competitive on well known brands of ink. The brand message is as important as the price message. This is important in the ink space and stationery more boradly.
We have the HOT Ink! brochure in a stand at the front of the shop (see photo) to attract passers-by in the centre and we give one to each customer. This is a good time to be promoting ink since it fits with the end of the financial year and sales which major retailers are running right now. HOT Ink! is a nice competitive pitch.
Disclosure: HOT Ink! is an exclusive newsXpress offer. I am a Director of newsXpress.
The Kindle for iPhones application puts Amazon’s Kindle books, magazines and newspapers on the radar for Australians. I wonder if this is Amazon testing which markets to enter with the Kindle proper. It will be interesting to see if Australian publishers embrace this. They should. It’s a whole new market.
PaperCuts, a website recording layoffs at US newspaper publishers, has just passed 10,000 layoffs this year.
Retail outlets are important to newspaper publishers here in Australia. It is disappointing to see Fairfax today trying to switch people from retail purchase to home delivery using an ad stuck on the front of The Age newspaper. I’d prefer to see them invest in increasing retail sales like News Limited is doing with their mX coupon promotion this week.
Magazine distributor NDD sent the following to newsagents in the Newcastle area this week:
NDD will undertake a trial delivering NDD product into the Newcastle area via Australia Post for both newsagent and supermarkets for a three week period for onsale Wednesday 3 Jun; Wednesday 10 June and Wednesday 17 June 09.
It is anticipated that your store will receive the NDD Delivery of magazine daytime Tuesday prior to the onsale.
The key parcels and bulks will be stickered with an Australia Post barcode for tracking.
British Football and Inside Football will be delivered by 1st Fleet on the Wednesday.
PaidContent reports that a group of US newspaper executives met secretly to discuss charging for online content. Their next moves will be crucial. If they get this wrong they will suffer the same consequences of films, videos and music and have their content made available free through a variety of sources online. The Atlantic has good coverage on this story too.
Publishers need to understand that their main funding has not come from charging for access to content, it has come from advertising. To try and monetise content online through consumer payment will require a significant shift. I don’t see this working.
Look at what Dennis in the UK has done. They have created new online brands for specific demographics. They have engaged advertiser support. The financial model is based entirely around the new model and not trying to fund the high cost of the old (print) model. Look at what Crikey has done here in Australia – a pure online brand, subscription and advertiser supported and, again, based entirely around the new model.
Publishers trying to backend their operations into an online content paid for model is a recipe for failure. The people to build monetise content online most successfully will be more likely not currently working for a print media company.
Go back to the interview with Rupert Murdoch to which I referred earlier today. In discussing weather and similar services he says people will have to pay for this. No, they will not. It is too late for publishers to try and charge for what is free from so many sources.
Here is Rupert Murdoch talking about the future of newspapers. A must watch for newsagents. The opening questions is: will there be newspapers?
This interview is interesting in the context of contract newspaper distribution negotiations. I remain unconvinced about the need for contracts.
The interview follows an ad for the Fox Business Network.
Every day there are more stories about this topic yet newsagents continue to agree to build shop fits with expensive purpose-built newspaper and magazine stands. Our shop fits need to be flexible, able to change without additional capital cost.
What the interview and see for yourself the changes we need to embrace in our newsagency businesses.
I respect Rupert Murdoch. He knows what his business stands for and pursues that relentlessley. He also cleverly uses his own channels, like Fox Business Channel, to preach his message. We can learn from this. We have a traffic rich channel today yet many of us are not using this to take our customer’s hands and lead them to our future. This is because we don;t know what the future is and because we are scared about engagement with our customers. But those are conversations for another time.
UPDATE: Check out the coverage this has received in the last 24 hoours. Murdoch’s important place in this discussion is obvious.
We have been recording good sales from the single pockets of Take 5 and That’s Life which we have been placing above New Idea and Woman’s Day in recent weeks.
Take 5 and That’s Life are located four columns to the right from the location in the photo – further into our women’s magazine aisle and while some are sales we would have received anyway, some are sure to be sales solely due to additional placement of the titles.
We will rest Take 5 and That’s Life in this location shortly and focus on other titles likely to be purchased by New Idea and Woman’s Day customers.
We find this additional placement works well on the weekend, when the less ferquent magazine shopper shops.
We have been early returning Swank porn magazine to NDD because it did not sell. We expected that supply would be reduced as a result of no sales recorded – trusting the magazine distribution system. Well, not really. Here we are, months on, zero sales and we still receive the title. The NDD system is failing us. I am not against us carrying porn.
My preference for erotica / porn titles is the same as the rest of my newsagency – branded product with a market presence and good promotion to drive interest. Swank is not such a title. I wish we had more control – it’s my money at risk here.
Instead of an analog paper printed on paper you may get it on a panel which would be mobile, which will receive the whole newspaper over the air, (and) be updated every hour or two. You’ll be able to get the guts or the main headlines and alerts and everything on your Blackberry, on your Palm or whatever, all day long. All these things are possible. Some of the greatest electronics companies in the world are working on this very hard.
This is a quote from Rupert Murdoch speaking overnight in an interview with the Fox Business Network. He provides more clarity than the News Limited executive interviewd locally for the ABC’s 7.30 report earlier this week.
This quote is important because it clarifies the situation for newsagents on News’ longer term view of a paper product. It also fits with what Murdoch has said previously about how consumers will access information previously accessed on paper.
Starwood Hotels group announced this week that they’ve entered into a partnership with Zinio to offer what they are calling a Digital Newsstand for free to guests in several of their hotel brands including the Four Points by Sheraton hotel properties. Hotel Chatter has more on this.
Also, Starwood will be the first hotel company to offer VIVmag, the first interactive digital women’s luxury-lifestyle magazine, conceived and designed exclusively to be read digitally.
Darrell Lea is using smart attractive counter units, as shown in the photo, to help us introduce new products at the counter and thereby drive impulse purcahses. The Espresso Crunch is a stylish looking product. We have it at our lottery counter where we know Darrell Lea product sells well. Now if only they would develop a free standing slim floor unit which we could locate at register points for promoting top selling products.
Embroidery & Cross Stitch is another Express Publications title with problems. We received 9 copies of the last issue and today returned 8. It is junk like these triple packs from Express which detract from beautiful cross stitch titles which look more appealing and often sell better. With a sell through of just 11%, I would expect the magazine distributor to reduce supply. When it comes to Express titles I am not confident of this. On a side issue – I wonder if advertisers know that issues containing their ads are recycled through these triple packs on a never-ending petrol guzzling cycle.
The issue of Fishing Knots & Rigs which went on sale this morning has a barcode which the publisher reusing a barcode which has been used for two other titles in the last year. Express Publications are behind this – the same people who waste our space with double and triple packed bags of magazines which waste our space and cash.
The distributor ought to have refused to distribute today’s title because it fails to meet reasonable data standards.
Newsagents in Australia have been brought up on sale or return supply arrangements for stock. They have served us well.
Sale or Return is the supply basis for magazines, newspapers, greeting cards and a range of stationery and gift items to newsagencies in Australia. Newsagents like SOR because they (we) see less of a risk if the products do not sell. Suppliers, especially those in the stationery and gift categories, know this and pitch SOR when introducing new lines.
I wonder if SOR lowers our expectation for products – because of the parachute of SOR which ‘protects’ us from failure.
We ought to assess new products as if SOR ‘protection’ does not exist. I suspect that some products we take on today would not make it. I also suspect we would work harder to move products and be more demanding when new products are presented.
The greater the risk we take the more focused we are on driving our success. SOR dilutes that risk and takes our focus away from being profit focused.
We received Good Garden Design on Wednesday for the first time and was surprised to see it heralded, above the masthead, as Australia’s Best Selling Garden Design Magazine. I thought if it’s the best then why are we only getting this title now. But I digress, the problem was that our space allocation for the category was fully used. So, we had to remove a title in order to accomodate this new (to us) title. To be fair to other publishers, we looked at space allocated to Universal magazines – the publisher of Good Garden Design.