CityLink, Skybus and more added to eziPass
eziPass, the new and free electronic voucher platform for newsagents got better overnight with then release of additional product. CityLink tollway passes, Skybus airport transfer tickets and Fishing Licences for Victorian and New South Wales have been added to the eziPass inventory. more products are on the way.
Newsagents can sell vouchers direct through the exclusive link in their Tower Systems point of sale software. A free stand alone version which any newsagent is welcome to use will be released in the next week.
Click here to access the eziPass sign up process.
We have created eziPass to provide newsagents with an easy to use platform through which phone recharge and other electronic voucher product can be sold. There is no long contract to sign and no complex hardware to install at your sales counter. Plus, on some products, margin is better.
Hurting a magazine’s brand
Th November issue of Delicious comes with a free book stuck to the cover. So browsers can see this in traditional magazine fixturing, the publisher has inserted a promotional card. the problem is that this card has been mangled en route as this photo shows:
Delicious is a high quality title and the promotional card detracts from that quality – especially given how it came out of the distribution process.
The real answer is that newsagents and other retailers engage in a more up to date way of displaying titles like this. The capital cost of such a move is prohibitive channel wide. I know having just been party to such expense at Watergardens. So, I am not sure what we can do without a huge capital outlay. What I do know is that the current approach is not serving titles like Delicious well which is why they resort to the promotional card.
Upselling at the lottery counter
Basic as it is, here how we promote selected Darrell Lea lines at our busiest lottery counter. We refresh this small display daily and change the products on offer several times a week.
Everyone likes to treat themselves once in a while and why not when they have bought a winning lottery ticket?
Tiny actions like this, using product placement to drive the up-sell, works better than what they do at Coles and Safeway petrol outlets – I am so over being harangued about buying their candy deals.
News Ltd buys Getprice
Furhtre evidence of the focus online by News Ltd with the news today that they have purchased Getprice. This announcement comes hot on the heels of the launch by ACP Magazines of shoptilyoudrop.com.au. While both models are quite different in operation, both connect to consumer purchases.
What is interesting is that publishers have realised that they cannot just put their offline model online. They are buying and reinventing existing models to be more appropriate to the online space. This is what newsagents have to do – not just drop their offline model online but to invent a new model appropriate to the online model.
I’d like to see a national one workshop on this topic – the online newsagency. The time is right and enough people are playing in the space to make valuable contributions.
Lottery agents association silent
Peter Judkins, the head of the Victorian Lottery Agents Association who publicly ridiculed me when I expressed concern that Tattersalls may lose instant scratch tickets to Intralot, has gone to ground. I contacted him for a comment now that my prediction came true – to see what his next plan was. Nothing. By being publicly silent through government consideration of the tender for lottery licences in Victoria, Judkins, his association and VANA have a lot to answer for.
The horse has bolted. Newsagents in Victoria look set to lose instant scratch ticket sales. I hold the associations accountable for this. Their public silence stopped newsagents taking action. We can now see that their strategy failed. Those on a salary in associations are okay, they still get paid. Their members lose out. But, oh, I forgot, we are not supposed to criticise dud association decisions. They are part of our fraternity. What utter nonsense.
Each association employee who recommended, supported and managed the poor campaign earlier this year ought to tender their resignation.
I am fired up about this because it would have been easy to fix – engage newsagents about the risk early on, get them to engage their customers. Even if it did not alter the decision we, collectively, would have felt as if we did something other than lying over and playing dead.
Boys and their toys
We hit on something when we created the first newspaper delivery run list for the Sony PSP device years ago. Now, we can display newspaper home delivery details on all manner of devices. The latest is the sexy htc touch phone. One of our sales team got his phone working with our home delivery run management software.
People we have shown like the look of this – despite what I consider to be small text. The bright screen would be a help early in the morning.
Since all our sales team have this new phone they’ll be equipped to show the facility off.
Tradie magazine in newsagencies
I was surprised to see The Tradie in a newsagency I visited yesterday. As I noted in June, this is magazine is given away on construction sites. Yesterday was the first time I had seen it for sale. It’s a good product which hits its mark well.
I don’t plan on carrying Tradie because locating the title to achieve a return would be a challenge. While I could put it next to Zoo Weekly, the majority of tradies pick up a newspaper and leave.
Art of knitting still strong
The Art of Knitting partwork is still strong many weeks in. It is by far the most successful partwork I have seen this year.
We are fortunate to not have the supply issues of others and so our view of the title benefits from the protection of good supply – but this goes to show what a good title can achieve if challenges in the partworks supply chain – from UK publisher through – are addressed.
Newsagents want what publishers and distributors want – to sell more magazines. The current model which cuts supply to lower than presold quantities works against all stakeholders. While I understand significant moves are being made to address supply issues, these cannot happen soon enough.
Magazines on your Zune, iPod and Sony PSP
Check this out: Perooz.com is a free web-based service that provides mainstream content such as videos, magazines and newspaper articles for users of portable media devices such as the Sony PSP, Apple iPod and Microsoft Zune. Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Onion, Car Magazine, Gizmodo Magaizne and Esquire to name a few of the titles available. Talk about disrupting the news and information supply chain!
Did you see the key word – FREE. This iPod, Zune and PSP generation understands, more than any generation before it, what FREE means.
Innovation in media
Northwestern University’s Media Management Center has published a report on innovation in news media. It you have any interest in media trends, read this report.
To succeed, we at Media Management Center believe, today’s media company leader must aggressively build into the very DNA of the company certain qualities that will help it survive and move forward, no matter how many unexpected turns the road takes. When the future is so unclear even to the most visionary in the business and the playing field isn’t in the control of media companies, these characteristics — flexibility, adaptability, innovativeness, resourcefulness, hustle, customer focus and commitment to both new partnerships and to workforce development – may matter more than a good strategy.
This from the executive summary of the report. It could apply to newsagents as much as it applied to media company executives.
Newsagents: beware of bearers of gifts
Newsagents need to be very careful in responding to unsolicited approaches from people representing others interested in buying newsagencies. Before you sign any confidentiality agreement, get it checked by a lawyer you trust. I would not provide any lease of financial data until I am certain of the identity of the potential purchasor and the purpose for which they want information.
The best way to protect your business is to ensure continuity of your lease – especially if you are in a shopping centre. Two years out, re-negotiate. The longer the lease term the better your position.
Winning a stationery customer
A customer called about the paper advertised in a stationery flyer we sent out with the local newspaper last week. He wanted to make sure we still had stock and to check our location.
Winning a new customer directly from external marketing like this is wonderful. It reinforces the value of regular advertising and marketing activity and the importance of branded hero products to generate interest.
This out of season stationery offer is a bonus.
Early Christmas cookbook sales
This ACP Women’s Weekly Christmas Cookbook has arrived with perfect timing. We have co-located it at the counter and next to Women’s Weekly – as well as in the cookbook area and sales are good.
At the weekend we had the Christmas cookbook on a display at the front of the shop with the Christmas edition of Better Homes and Gardens. Our boxed Christmas card sales show there is a market for Christmas products in October – you’ll never go poor by serving the needs of earlybirds.
Seductive benchmarking
Owning two newsagencies (Forest Hill and Frankston) and a shareholding in another (Watergardens) provides me with access to up to the minute intimate data about the businesses. This abundance of data from three different newsagencies is seductive and the learnings considerable.
Take magazines, we can see a category up in one store and flat or down in the others. We dig deeper and find out why and make some changes. Another example is diaries. In two stores we’re seeing excellent sales while the third is yet to get the diary story out. When they saw the data from the other two they actioned it right away.
Being able to easily compare across a common IT platform and using common department and category structure is fantastic.
I can see all three newsagencies significantly benefiting from access to the pool of data – the key is to not be seduced too deeply into analysis.
Magazine hot pockets
The magazine hot pockets we’re using at our Watergardens location are working very well. We are using them as part of our co-location strategy – bringing titles from another category into a higher volume area.
We’re finding that we need to move these titles regularly to get the best return on the space. I can see that as the business grows we will have a weekday offer and a different weekend offer – reflecting the change in demographic over those times.
How much for a 2006 desk calendar refill?
A couple of colleagues from Sydney on Saturday commented that our $2.00 price for 2008 desk calendar refills at Forest Hill was high. Their price was around 20% less. I checked our buy price and sure enough we were marking the calendar blocks up higher than usual – because at $2.00 we considered it to be still good value.
The $2.00 price point was considered carefully by Jason, our manager at Forest Hill. He went for a price which he felt was fair for the product and which was convenient – being at the counter, these are an impulse item at this time of the year. His view, with which I agree, is that the extra we make on this item is balanced by the thin margin on paper and some other products.
Given that newsagents are considered expensive by consumers, there is no point in trimming margin for what is to many an essential item. We’d rather leave margin trimming for promotions.
We’ve had the desk calendar refills out for five days and sales are excellent so price does not seem to be a barrier at Forest Hill.
I was in another newsagency yesterday at the same desk calendar refills were priced at $2.85. This is way too high.
I have been thinking a lot about this issue since Saturday. It goes to the heart of how we manage the stationery department in our businesses. Our competitors balance margin in the same way airlines balance ticket prices on a flight. Where they apply research and discipline to the task, we tend to operate off a flat margin with little consideration of what price an item could carry.
I think there is an opportunity for newsagents to talk more, in small groups, about how they approach pricing of stationery. While no one approach is right, I am certain that such discussion could improve the return all participants achieve.
SA State Government turns back on newsagents
This report in today’s Adelaide Advertiser reports the likely impact on small business newsagents as a result of the decision by the State Government to sell keno in TAB and PubTAB outlets. TAB is SA is part of Unitab – the Tattersalls subsidiary. Newsagents have served Keno players well and have an excellent track record for responsible sale of gambling products. There was no need for this move.
What is it with governments and lottery product? In Victoria the State Government prefers supermarkets over newsagents. In NSW the State Government prefers 7-Eleven over newsagents and now in SA the State Government prefers TAB outlets over newsagents.
HP beats other brands
I recently blogged that Canon was outselling other ink brands at our Watergardens store. At Forest Hill, HP is the hero brand – easily outselling all other brands of ink. I am surprised by the difference between the hero brand in each store and the next best performing brand.
My real interest in this analysis is getting the product mix right. Ink, with a shelf life, is a category which needs to be managed carefully. We did this recently when we quick generic product – something which has proven to be right for our business.
Bitch magazine in Frankston
I am surprised at the difference in magazines I have found at our new Frankston newsagency which we do not receive at Forest Hill.
Take Bitch magazine. It’s an interesting title, appealing to a narrow demographic. What surprises me is that it’s supplied to Frankston and not Forest Hill. There are other titles like – supplied to one and not the other – which, in my probably ignorant view, defy the demographic.
We are finding comparing the businesses fascinating. I expect it will lead to requests for more titles in one of both stores once we get our collective heads around the differences.
As a magazine lover, it’s wonderful to see new (to me) titles like Bitch.
Pink newspapers
Kudos to the folks at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald for taking the newspaper pink today in support of breast cancer research. Of all the promotions connected with newspapers and magazines over the years, I’d say that printing a newspaper on pink paper generated the most engagement – and awareness is all about just that.
Featuring TV related magazines
We have created a small display of magazine titles relating to TV shows at one of our register points. It’s working a treat with some of the slower moving titles selling off this stand on impulse.
We run displays like this weekly, featuring different categories and, as the photo shows, titles not usually displayed together but with some connection. We choose the display focus based mainly on team member suggestions.
A key element of the display is the border. It tells our customers what the display is about.
Too many newsagents take the set and forget approach to magazines. My view is that change is critical – hence our focus of time and resources on displays such as this one.
Western Union coming to Wal-Mart
It will be interesting to see if Western Union moves into K-Mart, Big W or other majors given the reports of their move into Wal-Mart. Newsagents have played an important role in establishing Western Union in Australia and account for a considerable chunk of their business.
calendarXpress website for newsagents
Last Friday, calendarXpress launched a website promoting its line of calendars and participating newsagents. This is an important online initiative designed to drive traffic to and sales for the newsagents involved. By developing other brands for niche categories in our newsagency businesses we can overcome prejudices and attract those who may not browse a newsagency.
calendarXpress, while created by newsXpress, is open to all newsagents as a means of better managing the calendar range and improving margin.
I am a Director of calendarXpress.