Engadget reports on some E Ink developments which were shown off at a trade show a couple of days ago. Some say E Ink could replace print newspapers. The challenges are battery power, portability and durability. Various publishers are investing in this and related technologies.
The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald have each opened free mobile phone access to their highly successful Good Food Guide listings. Given how the Guide is used by diners, I’d expect the mobile service to attract many users.
How does this affect newsagents? Every newspaper connected franchise which moves to online distribution channels is a challenge for newsagents – I hope they (we) are taking notice.
On a technical note, the team at Fairfax may want to make sure that links on The Age page reflect that. The FAQs talk only of the SMH.
Jeff Jacoby writing at The Boston Globe over the weekend writes about this. It’s a thoughtful piece – in a newspaper of all mediums. Howard Owens and others have some interesting observations on the same topic at his blog.
Discussion of the future of newspapers is important yet pretty much neglected here in Australia. Either we’re in denial or the challenges playing out overseas will pass us by.
Given the importance of newspapers to newsagents, it is vital we engage in the conversation about the future of the product in its current form. Such engagement will, hopefully, guide our commercial considerations about our own future. Our retail and distribution businesses were, after all, created by publishers to serve their needs.
At a Hong Kong trade fair yesterday I saw stationery from many China based factories. Some items were familiar to me – they are sold in Australia under a house brand. Given the prices offered, I was left wondering why newsagent house brands can’t be more effective than they are. Surely those newsagents who want a house brand strategy can buy better, sell for less and make more than is achieved today.
Based on the prices of some items I saw in Hong Kong, current pricing for house brand stationery offered to newsagents in Australia could be off by between 25% and 50%.
Newsagents often complain about browsers who spend too long reading magazines and newspapers and leave without making a purchase. We are about to experiment with a browsers bonus using a coupon which will hand to browsers and peak times in an effort to bounce them to another category and a purchase.
Our first offer is around greeting cards. Given that most magazine browsers in our newsagency to not buy a card we figures any sale is a bonus. We will test the coupon on Thursday and Friday evenings as well as on Saturday – our peak magazine browsing times.
Even though our range is small, these foreign Christmas cards sell very well.
Our view is that if we want to be a destination for cards, we need to cater to all possible niches, including foreign language cards. We do sell foreign language newspapers after all so it makes sense.
What we have not mastered is how we can locate these cards near our foreign language newspapers to maximise the up-sell opportunity – not that we need to as they sell very well.
Courtesy of Gomestic. Who knew?!!!
I’ve been told about a rep who visited our Forest Hill store Friday who wanted us to carry some new magazine which is to be given away free. It will change your business forever, he said. It will change your customer’s lives, he said. I think we need to get a water pistol at the counter to cool down some of the cultish reps who claim they will change our lives. We should give then 15 seconds to leave otherwise we squirt them. They will soon learn. If I want my life changed I’ll go to Mecca, Vatican City, Lourdes or Lumbini.
The Standard free newspaper in Hong Kong is different to the free daily newspapers I have seen elsewhere. A free newspaper like this would impact sales of paid-for newspapers is released in Australia. It has everything from serious news – a page one story on the exchange rate – through to good sports coverage – a back page story about the loss suffered by Shane Warne’s All Stars here yesterday to Sri Lanka in the Hong Kong Sixes.
While we have geographic challenges in Australia and lack the capital city population mass of, say, Hong Kong, I am sure that the free model is something Australian newspaper publishers continue to watch with keen interest. Newsagents would do well to match that interest.
The folks at The Standard have excellent distribution around Central if what I saw in Hong Kong this morning is anything to go by. Entrances and exits to railway stations are manned by happy teams. Take a look at the scene outside World Wide House at 7:30 this morning.
I saw fewer people handing out the Headline Daily, a Chinese title.
Both papers are more traditional newspaper like than mX back in Australia. Headline Daily is 48 pages and even though in Chinese, I get the feel it is more than fashion and pop culture. The Standard, also 48 pages, is better than many newspapers I have purchased.
This photo shows just three of the massive range of desk calendars we have received at our Sophie Randall cards and gifts store. (For view of more of the range click here.) Between ten a fifteen of the titles would work very well in newsagencies. We sell beading, knitting and similar titles so why not the specialist desk calendars which connect to the same demographic?
While newsagents have good coverage of hanging calendars, we tend to shy away from these desk products.
Subway has a brilliant promotion at the moment – buy four Subway Fresh Fit meals between now and early December and for $50 more plus $10 postage you get a Repco bike. Subway has established itself as the healthy fast food and this promotion reinforces that. A bike for $50 in excellent value.
This campaign keeps Subway playing in a different ocean to the traditional fast food outlets. This is what newsagents, or at least each of the marketing groups, need to do – stand for something which separates from the pack and gives consumers a reason for active support.
While the folks at The Age have spared their masthead, they have allowed the National Australia Bank to pay to cover park of the photo on the front page of the Domain section of today’s newspaper.
Beyond my dislike of these stuck-on ads, they disrespect the creative team behind the newspaper and they frustrate customers. The folks at NAB will win themselves no friends from this ad today.
We heard this week that newsXpress Forest Hill is ranked #7 nationally and #2 in Victoria for sales of Lovatts titles. The Lovatts brand dominates the crossword and puzzle space and we have made a concerted effort around this category for several years. That effort is paid off in these rankings – both are way above our overall state and national magazine sales rankings. I’d put our success down to obsession with the catgeory and smart use of technology – our in-store actions are data driven.
newsXpress stores accounted for seven of the top sixteen newsagency outlets for Lovatts product. Newspower had five, Nextra three and one was unaligned to a marketing group. I appreciate Lovatts tracking sales and reporting at the marketing group level – nothing like a bit of health competition.
I see crosswords as a crucial category for newsagents. Done well, they demonstrate a point of difference to a very loyal and cost effective consumer – they are a honey pot around which you can build other success. The key is to carry a broad range yet ensure that the magazine distributors do not load you with foreign titles which are dumped here and soak up too much real-estate.
This drinks fridge is in the middle of a wall of stationery in the newsagency we purchase two weeks ago.
The location, while convenient to the counter, is odd. It blocks a clean view of the stationery offer. It demonstrates the persuasive power of the supplier at the time. Too often in newsagencies I see a drinks fridge or some other item stuck in the middle of another category, impacting the flow of the business and confusing customers.
Some reps are push beasts and their aggressive efforts can lead newsagents away from their core offer.
Our drinks fridge is being removed next week.
A call for greeting card category standards
While magazine publishers and distributors long ago reached agreement on category standards, greeting card companies continue to fail newsagents. The lack of standards makes store level reporting, within the greeting card category, challenging. In our software newsagents have exceptional reporting tools – return on floor space, return on shelf space, supplier comparisons, ROI – there are many angles from which newsagents can analyse data gathered by the system. It is impossible for newsagents to determine the best card supplier in their store. This denies them the opportunity to be business like.
Some newsagents are so frustrated by this experience that they are planning to place barcode stickers on cards before they are placed on the shelf.
Card manufacturers must act urgently and together to sort this out. Every month the current situation continues is another month newsagents are not able to have the best possible information available to build their business.
The IT standards necessary to manage this already exist.
This is what I wrote to greeting card companies in the Tower Systems newsagent supplier newsletter in October 2006. I was writing out of frustration – having worked with card companies for more than two years of the data project with little real progress to show for the effort.
While I initiated the project with the card companies first in 2004, getting the 15 or so publishers to agree is where the time has gone.
The Tower newsletter generated significant action and finally, based on meetings we had last week, we can see that standards between card companies are close to final agreement.
Newsagents are set to benefit significantly from this project and it won’t matter what software they run – when I first took this to the card companies I made it clear that we had to approach this the same way we approached the MPA standards in the magazine area. While the smaller software companies benefit from the pioneering work of others, the borader industry benefits and that is what really matters.
While I was involved in a magazine relay this morning I saw first-hand the frustration of a customer over triple packs. Which one am I supposed to buy – they all look the same. She was right, three versions of this title, all current. How am I supposed to find which one I want if they are sealed up? At least she didn’t rip open the pack like others had with other double and triple packs. I don’t know how they expect to sell these magazines, our customer said as she walked out frustrated.
I assume these triple packs continue to come because they sell. It surprises me because they are hard to cost effectively merchandise, they frustrate customers and they often have longer than usual on-sale periods.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
