Author: Mark Fletcher

I missed The Ultimate Guide to Poker when it came in last month. While we have it located with sports titles, it will not find its market if just left there. We are promoting it as part of our Father’s Day pitch – next to our Poker gift packs. We will also include the title into our displays with newspapers. We are also thinking of how we might co-promote this and other poker titles with the Intralot poker scratch game. All this may seem like hard work for a small category. Our view is that it is worth it because it promotes range.

We have created a counter display for Home Beautiful at our Frankston newsagency. The free shopper guide with the magazine qualifies it for a premium display. Frankston does not have the slatwall behind the display – this will, be in our new shopfit.

We have placed the new look Notebook magazine at the counter at Forest Hill. It also qualified for this spot given the free mascara with this issue. For those new here, this space is between our two main registers. Behind the display is slatwall – crucial so customers can buy off a display

We appear to be in the middle of bagged magazine season. Right now, more than any time I can recall, we have more bagged magazines in store. This is happening in the car, craft and homes categories.

These bags hinder browsing. Browsing is important to sales. I appreciate that the publishers see value in the free magazine to drive sales. I disagree.

Publishers need to find more clever ways to drive sales. For example, If I were publishing an Holden and Ford magazines I’d stage a state by state trivia competition around the brands, get people loyal to the brands competing in a fun atmosphere with the brands the focus. I reckon that a $50,000 spend nationally could result in a more valuable sales lift than bagging and hiding the magazines from browsers.

Wine Collector is a smaller volume title from ACP Magazines which often gets forgotten in retail merchandising. Rhonda at our Frankston store created this stunning display using colour photocopies of the front cover and the one poster which we were sent for the title. While I often complain about in-store billboard advertising, this time I like that we are promoting a title and category most other magazine retailers will ignore – this is where we get a flow-on benefit as we are promoting range.

The team at our Frankston newsagency took a basic looking crossword display which was not working that well and created a border and cap which beautifully frame the offer and draw customer attention.

This unit is in front of the photocopier, just at the end of the counter. It is using what used to be dead space.

The border is easy and cheap to make (but difficult to attach). Its purpose is to frame the offer and make the magazines more visible to shoppers. With so much colour in a newsagency it is easy for displays of magazines to get visually lost. Hence the value of a border to pull focus and generate sales – especially a monochrome border as we have used here.

Crosswords are a good category for counter promotion. At Frankston, they account for 7% of all magazine sales and appeal to a wide demographic. We know from our work over the last new months that we can achieve double-digit growth year on year from this category. They will be a semi-regular feature at the counter.

The budget family meals booklet which comes with That’s Life this week earns the magazine a place at our counter, especially at the lottery counter where we have placed it. Money is tight, we read about that everywhere. It stands to reason people will be interested in ways to cut costs – hence the relevance of the free booklet. The smart yet simple placement of a good value offer like this at a busy counter can mean more for us in incremental sales than a full-on aisle end display as some of the publishers want. This is why I would rather newsagents judged based on sales success and not compliance around pretty displays.