At the request of suppliers and other stakeholders in the newsagency channel, Tower Systems has put together an offer to help newsagents who want to shift from the out of date POS Solutions DOS software. Newsagents with this out of date software risk becoming the excuse for suppliers ignoring newsagents. Email the Tower sales team for further information.
We are in the process of expanding the gift offering in our Frankston store. Whereas in the past the store focused on cheap (I’d say – tacky) gists, we have gone for a more premium offering. Already customers are respsponding. The biggest challenge is how to work with existing newsagent fixtures.
This photo shows one of several gift areas we have created. We will be able to show a better story once we complete a shop fit early in 2008. We have especially high hopes for the top shelf flush in the photo – this is the Asthma friendly range as endorsed by the Asthma Foundation in the US.
Caravan Motorhome is so this this month that we can only fit one copy per pocket. This significantly increases the real-estate investment required by newsagents to support the title. The pub lisher thinks that they add value by putting two old issues with the current issue. I suspect market research would show that customers are as frustrated as retailers with such a useless triple pack.
I reckon That’s Life sales will slip this week because of the free clutch purse they are giving away. The purse floats in a sealed bag with the magazine and invariably covers the masthead. In half an hour I was asked three times if we had sold out of That’s Life by customers standing in front of a stack. The top magazine on the stack looked like the copy in the photo. While some customers will ask and others will pick up the title in the regular That’s Life space, some will walk out not purchasing the title.
The team behind Beer and Brewer magazine invited me to celebration of their first three issues next Wednesday night at the Belle Hotel in South Melbourne. I can’t make it because I’ll be on the Gold Coast that night. I checked with David Lippman, the Publisher of Beer & Brewer and he said he’d be glad to welcome any newsagents who support the magazine. Please email David if you’d like to attend.
Beer & Brewer appears to b a fringe title, something you’d put in the food and wine section. It also sells in cars section. Makes sense if you think about it. This is a title which lends itself to the co-location I bang on here about. For example, I think it would work on the lottery counter at the weekend.
These are the kinds of stationery newsagents need to stock more of. These stationery packs sit between what we traditionally call social stationery and more specialist paper products such as those from Artee and Christina Re.
The two packs in the photo are a small part of a much bigger range – every item is fantastic.
Newsagents can push the envelope in this more social area as there are fewer competitors. We bust our balls competing with Officeworks, K-Mart, Big W and others at Back To School and other traditional stationery seasons yet no national network is driving in this social space. The opportunity is ours if we want it.
While some individual newsagents and the newsXpress group is playing in this space, there is room for more newsagents to become engaged.
It is good to see issue #2 of Little Ears magazine out. Little Ears is the kind of niche publication which needs to succeed. It provides an important community service – encouraging children to read – and it reinforces the role newsagents can play in niche publishing.
I’ve been in Sydney today for several meetings and to help a newsagent in need. I am shocked at the gross oversupply being experienced by this newsagent – magazine distributors have the data to stop such criminal behaviour – it goes to shop that while noisy folk, like me, may be (overall) satisfied with supply, less vocal newsagents are at risk of poor treatment.
For all the talk of standards, today’s visit reminded me of how one sided the standards issue is. How can any magazine distributor justify increasing supply on a title achieving 50% sell through or less? They cannot. No wonder this operator, new to the industry, wants to get out.
I wonder what it will take for magazine distributors, publishers and other stakeholders to understand the gravity of what they are doing? Blood on their hands? The anguish I see and hear about make that a possibility – alarmist as that sounds. Magazine distributor management ought to visit newsagents, regular newsagents, and ask if there is a supply problem. If they have the guts to do this they should wear protective clothing.
Magazine Week in the UK in September appears to have been a success in raising awareness of magazines in major population centres if their website is anything to go by. The photo shows how one WH Smith store embraced the promotion. While some magazine retailers would have been more resourced than others to embrace the week, that there was national focus on the category had to be good not only for the titles but also the retailers. I’d liv to see a Magazine Week run here by newsagents.
We are experimenting with a new approach for cards not in our everyday range at our Sophie Randall store. With space a premium and a desire to better serve customers we have started a self-managed doubling and tripling of card pockets.
For two weeks we have been testing our approach with 99 pockets. Customer feedback and sales both suggest that in the Sophie store the idea will work well – customers browse for longer than in a newsagency, are prepared to work to find what they want and we have the labour resources to manage the pockets daily to ensure we’re not out of stock. With only two of each design in each pocket, daily checking is essential.
Once we have extended this to our full face card display wall we will cover 243 facings and have capacity for over 700 designs. This will help us through seasons such as Christmas where fixturing for lifestyle cards is lost to the seasonal display.
We don’t plan to test this approach in our newsagencies. The consumer mindset when shopping for a card in a newsagency is very different to what we see in a Sophie store.
Music magazines are doing well for us in what is a tough magazine marketplace. Unit sales are up 13% year on year to October 31.
We have maintained range and co-location commitment to ensure the category is in front of people not browsing the music location.
I am surprised to see any growth because of the impact iTunes and other download facilities. We read reports almost daily about how over the counter sales have fallen. It would appear that a well stocked and displayed music section helps make your store a go to location for music fans.
Digging deeper I can see that the growth is being achieved across all segments in the category – not just the higher volume titles. NOTE: This is not an invitation for magazine distributors to send more. Nor am I claiming the same result will be found in all newsagencies.
Newsagents who energetically embrace special interest categories establish themselves as magazine specialists whereas those who treat special interest categories (music, hobbies, craft, crosswords, art etc) as second class citizens are magazine retailers. There is a difference. Given that magazines are in so many retail outlets, it is essential for newsagents to proudly embrace their point of difference – if they have the population and demographic to support this.
I have experienced first-hand the cheap labels for magazines being sold for use with our Tower Systems software. These cheap labels cost more in time and don’t respect customers. At Tower are are careful about label choice. Our most recent experience with labels bought by someone else shows that the cheapest is not always the best.
Woman’s Day’s Everyday Food is taking off. We are having considerable success with this title at the lottery counter and next to Woman’s day – as well as in the food section of our magazine display. It’s a title we’re happy to give prime display real-estate to since it is fresh and speaks to the traditional newsagency customer.
Analysis for data from our Forest Hill store shows that this title is rarely sold alone – suggesting that it is the add-on purchase to one of the weeklies. This is why we co-locate it, to grad the impulse purchase. Even though it is an odd size and therefore difficult to display conveniently alongside other food titles, I am overall happy with Everyday Food.
I expect the sale of bags this Christmas to be huge if bag sales through the year are anything to go by.
Maybe it is because we are time poor (or at least we are told we are time poor) that bags are so popular. I think it has more to do with a better range this year than in the past plus better placement of bag displays in newsagencies and other retailers which are driving sales. Whatever, bag sales are strong.
The bags in the photo and others we have on offer are attractive and sure to help drive sales. The designs demand to be displayed so the whole bag is seen – imagine just the handle part showing, who would buy that? This is where newsagents need to be strong retailers and put the bags where they will be seen – completely.
Greeting card companies can be frustrating sometimes. One day they will go to extraordinary lengths to help your business and the next they will throw up a barrier which hinders your business. I saw this first hand recently where several suppliers to one business did not work together to create an integrated Christmas Card display. The result, while visually attractive, was not browser friendly.
Customers looking for, say, a Gradnmother Christmas Card will look in the first place they find the header card. They would not expect the retailer to locate these cards in three or four locations – depending on the number of card suppliers.
While we now often see integrated displays in the everyday range, several times this year I have seen non integrated seasonal displays. The browser is not served well and the retailer suffers.
Reuters reports that Kylie Minogue has launched a mobile social networking site for her latest single, “2 Hearts.” This ground breaking move by Kylie cuts out traditional midea outlets as ‘middlemen’ between Kylie and her fans.
The new site, www.KylieKonnect.com, lets fans register their mobile phones, blog, communicate with other users and upload images and video.
The Reuters article said the company behind KylieKonnect believes the new site is a more mobile and flexible model than social network sites like MySpace and Facebook – social media tools used by other music artists.
Why is this of interest to newsagents? The move by Kyile Minogue is further evidence of significant disruption to the traditional media on which our businesses rely. We can’t block our ears and wait for this to go away.
Trading cards have been very good to us over the years but this year, sales have dropped considerably. As sales have fallen, we have run stock down. It was time for a decision – restock and repromote or get out of the category.
We have chosen to quit trading cards use the space for a new category.
Trading cards appeal to a very specific demographic and while there is a risk in no longer being a destination for them, the cost of the stock and space far outweighed the commercial benefit of their purchases. We looked at what else sold with trading cards and found support for our decision to quit.
Change is important in newsagencies – without it, our customers become as store blind as us.
The US Audit Bureau of Circulations newspaper circulation data released overnight shows falls of close to 3% in circulation compared to the year before for most major US dailies. Read the New York Times report here or see a list of similar stories at other websites here. Publishers knew this was coming and have been busy putting out stories about growth in traffic to their masthead related websites.
While the US market is very different to Australia, we must expect similar falls here in 2008 and beyond – our strong home delivery penetration based on subscription deals can hold the dam wall for only so long.
Consumers have news and information channels which did not exist years ago. Australian publishers have demonstrated they understand this through their considerable investments in online and other businesses (free newspapers for example) in recent years.
Australian Newsagents, apparently, are yet to get it that newspapers are in decline. We need to reflect the decline in our capital investment programs. This is why the Watergardens concept store in which I am involved has not put newspapers at the heart of the business. We promote and sell them but not at the heart. We are at the heart – our brand as this is the one key aspect of the business we can control.
My view is that proactive entrepreneurial newsagents have a bright future. The news from the US of newspaper sales falling around 3% is disappointing but not unexpected and in line with what many expected. The decline will continue.
Conde Nast is apparently closing US House & Garden magazine with December issue bringing its almost 100 year run to a close according to a report at WWD.com.
We have placed the Australian Women’s Weekly branded Big Summer Puzzle book in our high traffic women’s area as well as in our crossword area.
We see this as the kind of title which is more likely to sell outside the traditional crossword category – in part because of the AWW branding and in part because it is a special (seasonal) edition. It demands to be promoted accordingly.
We have broken with MPA magazine layout guidelines and created thee feature (promotional) columns in and around the women’s weeklies segment and this is helping is achieve growth for other categories which fewer customers browse. This strategy provides us the space to promote Big Summer Puzzles. We will leave it here for a week or two before replacing with another title we choose to promote.
I like the idea of going hard with a title like this, grabbing as many sales as possible early in its shelf life. This helps with space management as well as cash flow. We use this approach often, most recently with the AWW Christmas Cookbook. I think that what we are doing in this area is more important, for us, than wonderful aisle end displays.
I was in Adelaide today and noticed a wonderful kids area in the Newslink store at the Qantas end of the domestic terminal. What made this work compared to the many kids areas I have seen in other newsagency like businesses is the integration of the walls, floor and fixture story. They combined to support the product beautifully. It felt like a store within a store without distancing itself too far form the overall Newslink newsagency concept. I’d publish a photo but I was late for my flight.
We have replaced cigarettes with ink from HP, Epson, Canon, Lexmark and Brother behind the counter at our new Frankston business – Quayside newsagency. The border used is the same as used on the headline for the brochures we’re sending out with the local paper to homes around our area.
Our evaluation of the performance of cigarettes made the decision to quit the category easy. With three more specialised outlets nearby it made no sense for us to remain the smallest player in such a challenged and regulated retail category.
The ink store sits well with other changes we are making in the business. The story behind the counter is appropriately in your face.
We are trying a different approach with planners this year.
Whereas in the past we treated these difficult to display planners as second class citizens ahead of a more prominent diary story, this year we have put the planners centre stage on the dance floor. They are rewarding the attention with excellent sales.
Planners are not big at Forest Hill yet this prime position is driving sales better than previous years. It goes to reinforce the importance of location.
Publishers have the power to educate and influence public opinion through the powerful medium of magazines. Taking simple steps toward sustainability makes them look good and feel good about their product.
This is the opening pitch by Co-op America’s Magazine PAPER Project an important project designed to encourage magazine publishers to support to make environmental commitments which preserve the health of forests, human health, and communities.
Around 240 Barnes & Noble stores throughout the US will run in-store promotions highlighting magazines that use recycled paper in support of the Magazine PAPER Project. Kudos to Barnes & Noble for this move!
This is an opportunity for Australian newsagents to show their environmental credentials. We could get behind a similar push here to support magazines printed on recycled paper.
We have created the first of several Christmas displays in our recently opened Christmas window – this was a boxed in Window and now we have removed the slat-wall backing it has brought the shop into the window.
To start our Christmas theme we have selected this range of premium plush. Jane created the display Thursday and already sales are strong. By remaining low we are aiming to share attention with the range of cards and bags beyond the plush display.
It is likely we will have three displays as part of the Christmas season in this window.