Author: Mark Fletcher

We treated the latest issue of Woman’s Day Super Puzzler quite differently to past issues. We left more stock in the Women’s Weeklies section than in the crossword section. Sales for this issue are up 50% compared to the same period for previous issues. This is an excellent result. I’ve checked with several other stores and while some show growth, none as high as ours. I take this as even more support for placement of key branded crossword product permanently with the weeklies.

What we did with Woman’s day Super Puzzler is more important than an aisle end display or some other poster program publishers like yet it has bee more successful. If only they would reward that business success more so that a pretty display. Yep, treat me like a business person, please.

Cleo Click from ACP Magazines is a fascinating new magazine – launched today.

Extending the reach of the successful Cleo brand, the folks at ACP have created a title which claims, on the cover: everything inside is available online.  The ninemsn website has more of the pitch to girls who want become Web Queens.

I’m surprised that there is not a more significant online presence supporting the title – given the subject matter.  But, then, they are speaking to people currently offline and guiding them online so…

I like brand extensions in the magazine space and right now ACP are the masters if you look at what they are doing around Woman’s Day, Australian Women’s Weekly, Take 5 and, now, Cleo.

One challenge I see with Cleo Click is how we represent the proposition.  This is a title which has appeal beyond people who will browse women’s titles.

Costco, a giant in warehouse retailing in the US and rapidly growing in the UK reportedly plans five stores (according to a report in The Age) for its first year in Australia. It will be interesting to see if their Aussie stores include magazines – they are a small selection of top selling magazine titles in the UK and already sell them in the US stores.

With more majors playing in the magazine space, the trend I’d expect to see in newsagencies is a decline in weeklies and high volume monthlies and growth in special interest and other titles not carried by the majors. If I am right, more than ever it will be crucial for newsagents to achieve equitable terms on these titles.

Newsagents who stack the latest issue of Marie Claire into their shelves will obscure the title because of the free sunglasses stuck to a bit of cardboard inserted into the magazine. One alternative is to remove these and have them behind the counter – but you lose the in-store promotion opportunity and lump in extra labour to manage this and space requirements to store the sunglasses. Ugh. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Well, it’s not a magazine, more like a book but distributed as a magazine.  Computers, Windows and the Internet has out of date content.  By any measure, it is useless – except for the distributor and publisher who unlock cash from newsagents given that we pay for it six months before it unsold copies are die to be sent back.  This title is a con and the folks at NDD know it.  It should never have been published let alone distributed.  Last year we returned everything sent and this year they increased our supply.  Yep, a con!  Sure we can early return – but it has come in too late for that this month so we’re out of pocket for at the very least 30 days.

It’s good to finally receive some marketing material from ACP Magazines’ Connections newsagent in-store marketing program. I wonder how many newsagents started using their Connections aisle ends or windows for promoting other product?

Publishers need to realise that magazines are published 52 weeks a year and we’re open 52 weeks a year. Turning off marketing support provides us with an opportunity to find other uses for the promotional space as my post earlier this week showed.

I have nothing against the Scots.  I am sure that this magazine, No1, or Free or whatever it is called – (yep, I am confused) is a good seller in Scotland.  As the masthead says, it’s the top seller.  But do we really need this title in Australia?  We are straining under a mass of imported weeklies from the UK already.   Now we have to find retail space for this new title – in an area already short of real-estate.  This is a title I, as magazine czar for all newsagents, would have NOT allowed to our channel.  The sooner we collude and block access to titles like this on current terms the better.

The photo shows our latest magazine feature display – magazines themed around holiday activities.  It’s at our Forest Hill store.

You’ll see we have gone for a mixture of children’s activities as well as places for adults to visit.

 As with previous display, magazines have sold of this stand almost right away. While this is, in part, due to the location next to a busy register, it is also due to providing context for the purchase of the titles. Sometimes leading customers to a purchase works well.

The display has been up since Friday last week and we have already topped some titles up twice.

There is no doubt that the demographic of our newsagency (and most newsagencies I suspect) changes during the holidays. We seize this change as an opportunity to win new customers and make money visitors to the area. Each week for the next few weeks this display will change to try and tap into the holiday demographics.

Publishers apparently think that retailers are closed with little in the way of point of sale materials provided with magazines today. We have been resourceful at or Forest Hill location and created a display for the new issue of Women’s Health. We used black and white copies of the cover to create a canvass on which to feature the magazine.

Publishers who complain about lack of support from newsagents ought to realise that retail is 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.

While our Women’s Health display shows that newsagents can be resourceful in creating displays, not every store has the resources we have to get a display like this done efficiently – hence the reliance on the point of sale packs from publishers.

We worked through or magazine categories last week and refreshed displays to reflect the summer season.

With space limited we cannot always give enough real-estate to some categories so we allocate space based on seasons – hence our decision to lift the profile of fishing, caravans and boats in this latest series of changes. This involved us allocating another column so we could create a three pocket masthead display for each feature title. Sometime toward the end of summer the focus will change again.

We see this work as an essential part of managing (obsessing about) magazines.