Impulse lines off the charts this Christmas
One newsagent was putting out boxes of impulse lines a week ago and one customer purchases four full boxes spending close to $300. While we have not experienced that, our impulse lines of funky gifts and toys are going exceptionally well. These Sp;at Balls are a good example – selling out in a week. These types of products are terrific financially and enjoyable for the delight they bring our shoppers.
While Christmas decorations and gifts are performing well, it’s impulse lines we are spending the most time keeping up with. Thankfully suppliers are topping up quickly.
Another product that makes people smile
This Super Putty is another interactive product we love watching customers engage with. We have a tub open and actively encourage them to try it. Many who do buy because they enjoy the experience. How good they feel when playing with the putty or watching someone play with the putty is a key factor in their purchase decision – you can see it in their faces, especially parents and grandparents when they see their kids and grand kids having fun.
It’s a pleasure selling happy
I love the terrific range of feel-good fun products we have in store at the moment. I love them because our customers love them. Their smiles are a delight to see.
These happy hoppers are a good example. You can launch them off your hand or any surface. They make kids laugh. We sell them to kids through to grandparents. We’re finding them to be a good stocking stuffer gift.
We have plenty of items like these that are interactive out on the shop floor. They add to the theatre of retail.
Making staples appealing as a gift
I love this staple pack I noticed at David Jones in the menswear department – it makes staples sexy, something to give as a gift … of course, that’s why David Jones had it placed there with a bunch of other items they are pitching as gifts for guys. this is something we could easily sell – in our gift departments, not stationery. It’s something that would also command a higher margin than traditional stationery.
I encourage newsagents looking for funky gift ideas to visit David Jones – there are plenty of ideas for next year.
Sunday newsagency marketing tip: thirty Christmas marketing ideas
For many years I have published Christmas marketing ideas as a resource for others to use and as inspiration for newsagents to think of their own. Here are thirty easy to implement simple Christmas marketing ideas for newsagents for Christmas 2014. I’m not suggesting you use all: pick what suite you and create your own.
- Promote every day items as gifts within your displays. magazines work in this situation. Too often retailers focus on items they have sourced for Christmas and then wonder why there is little flow on once the season is over. One way to embrace the opportunity is to pitch everyday products as gifts. This could involve packaging them that’d appropriate.
- Pitch magazines for different groups. For example: gifts for guys: create an off-location display of magazines for guys so that those buying christmas cards and gifts in your shop can consider magazines as a gift.
- Pitch magazine putaways as gifts. You could offer a title put away for three or six months – something different to subscription lengths.
- Make sure the front of your shop, the window our the front facing the street or mall has your best offers. This is what the majors do. If you have an amazing deal, put it on show for all to see.
- Use a spruiker once a week at your busiest time to shout out about great items you have. If you can’t afford a spruiker, do it yourself. Go to any weekend market and see how it’s done. Have fun!
- Connect with a charity. In addition to products you may sell that raise funds for a charity consider a local charity and promote how every purchase in your store supports the charity.
- Have a box for collecting items for a local charity.
- Send Christmas cards to your customers – maybe invade a voucher for them to spend in-store.
- Give retailers nearby a discount card / coupon / voucher for them to do their own shopping. Consider a special buying night for retailers and their employees given the hours they are working.
- Have a crazy competition one day. Something like – come in and sing silent night in a completely fresh and crazy way and the best rendition wins, say, $100. Pitch it right and you’ll draw a crowd. Remember the crowd the now closed gaslight records in Melbourne drew for nude day.
- Offer a Christmas party flyer copying discount – half price copying of all Christmas party flyers.
- Host a colouring competition. Connect it with Christmas. Display all entries. Leverage an emotional connection through your theme such as: something good you have seen this year or your wish for someone else this Christmas.
- Keep it simple. While shops fill to overflowing with products this time of the year too often what you want seen can’t be seen because of the explosion of range and colour. Create space to show off your hero products, consider the less is more approach.
- Use stickers and or posters on your floor to show customers where you want them to go. Have Christmas themed basket builders at the counter – priced at under $10.00.
- Make an entrance. Create something around the entrance to your shop so that those stepping inside feel as if they are stepping into somewhere different, somewhere special.
- Have Christmas themed impulse items dotted next to main customer thoroughfares.
- Give every customer a flyer promoting your Christmas offers. Ideally you’ll have a couple of flyers through the season.
- Move everyday items elsewhere in the shop during the season – disrupt your regular shoppers.
- Dress up. Not just once but several times.
- Tell stories on your Facebook page about the season, what you’re doing and the fun you’re having.
- Have fun with your team and your customers.
- Thank your customers for their support.
- Setup a customer interaction board and invite them to post their best Christmas story.
- Have promotional days: free stamp Tuesday where you give free stamps with each card to people buying two or more cards; free tape Saturday for people buying two or more rolls or packs of wrap; free wrapping week where you offer free wrapping with every gift.
- Use your floor, Stickers and or posters on the floor can guide those customers who look down and not up.
- Place gifts / Christmas items in magazines. Your magazine department attracts shoppers to categories they love. leverage this with placement of appropriate items in those areas.
- Work the floor. At your busiest times have someone on the flor subtly showing off products you sell.
- Give your customers a reason to come back – an offer, a promotion, a discount voucher.
- Tell a story. If space permits, show how a feature product is used. For example, if you’re selling jigsaws, have a table with one half done. Getting shoppers interacting gets them more engaged with your business and engagement = sales.
- Love the season. This can be challenging with the extreme business of Christmas trading and the challenges that the season presents. But each day when you step into the shop try and love it as if it’s a fresh start.
Halloween is not Halloween without a coffin
The coffin arrived and is now in place as the centrepiece of our Halloween 2013 display. Sadly, like all Halloween centrepieces, it will probably sell early.
We’re making the most of the opportunity and showing others in the centre how to do Halloween – we;re expecting their displays this year to be like last, very vanilla (boring).
Sales continue to be excellent – up on 2012.
Slippery Wiggler another fun product for newsagency shoppers
We’re enjoying this Slippery Wiggler product. It’s another impulse-purchase fun item we have our team members playing with, showing off to shoppers and selling as a result. It’s hard to hang onto – hence the name. It’s a perfect product to demonstrate.
Slippery Wiggler connects with the newsagency shopper as a gift line and as a counter line. It helps us serve younger shoppers and those who buy for younger shoppers. Like all product categories we need to balance the number of these funky / disposable fun products with everything else we sell – but this is retail management 101.
I was talking to a newsagent about Slippery Wiggler a couple of days ago. Their preference is to sell a more expensive gift. I want to sell both as both work in different situations to different shoppers. To me buying products to sell in my newsagencies is all about maximising the basket as greater shopper efficiency is vital to the success of any retail business.
Having fun promoting your business
Further to my newsagency marketing tip from two weeks ago, check out the sign I saw today outside a cafe. This is terrific, very funny – something that shows they have a sense of humour. It makes this cafe more memorable than many others I walked past.
I’m sure there are fun things we can write on signs outside our newsagencies to show off our sense of humour and promote enjoyment to those who visit with us.
The things magazines have published
For a good laugh, check out the article at Cracked.com on three very funny, and dangerous, do it yourself projects published in magazines many years ago. The things magazines publish! Cracked was a humour magazine from the US. I preferred it to Mad magazine.
Brilliant Easter Bonnet Parade
I spent hours roaming the Easter Bonnet Parade on Fifth Avenue on Sunday. It was a treat to see amazing creativity at work. Just about all the Bonnets were home made using materials many of us sell in our newsagencies. It was inspiring to see what people created.
The parade is no real parade in that’s it’s not an organised march. People mingled and posed for photos … very un-New York … people relaxed and enjoying strolling the streets.
It was inspiring – to work on something like with local newsagents at the heart of promoting it. I know some do this very well already. But why not more? It’s something we could own for the community to enjoy.
Think Fun range a welcome addition to a newsagency
We are filling our shelves with products purchased at the recent trade shows we have attended. One range we are particularly excited about from Think Fun. It’s a range of fun, educational toy products that represent their name … these products are FUN.
I’ve written recently about the importance of happy , fun and optimistic products. They present a good message to shoppers. It takes the pitch away from the price pitch that the majors tend to focus on.
Actually, thanks to our recent buying our newsagency feels very happy. Customers are noticing.
The other benefit of the Think Fun range is the margin. They will help us get to the above-average GP we want for our newsagency businesses. This is where marketing buying group is key to unlocking additional points a single store may not be able to access.
the average retail newsagency GP is 28% to 32%. This does not cut it any more. We all need to be chasing 50%. We need to chase this with net traffic generating products and not so much with products that rely on existing, often declining, traffic.
Frivolous fun on a Saturday
I played with our AFL Beanie Kids display to reflect the drugs cloud currently hanging over the Essendon Football Club. It was a bit of nonsense fun but couldn’t get it right so I put the display back. I was looking for represent the Essendon mascots as drug enhanced compared to their competitors – like the upstanding Carlton.
Don’t tell the boss I was goofing off.
The relevance of the Lego brand
All around is, in some old businesses, we and see lessons of maintaining and even growing relevance. Lego is one such brand. The company itself continues to innovate. more important, it partners with others to innovate. From the retail examples I have shared here of innovative retail stores to new products, Lego is as relevant today – to new kids and to the nostalgia shopper.
Check out a video about a Lego pancake making machine. It’s fascinating on a range of levels from what it actually does to showing off how Lego is more than building bricks.
My takeaways are don’t be bound by your original business plan or the expectation of the majority about who you are and what you do.
It’s Saturday morning and time for breakfast. I wish I has one of these up and running right now.
Show and tell sells gadgets
One of the most popular gadgets / toys at CES in Las Vegas this year was this remote helicopter. Check out the video I shot at a display outside the main CES convention hall. The display goes longer than I filmed. It was a heap of fun.
Remote helicopter ballet at CES 2012 from mark fletcher on Vimeo.
I’d like to sell these but would need a bunch of other product to make a strong commitment to the geek / gadget / toy space and I don;t currently have the floorspace for this.
The takeaway from seeing products like this is that they sell best through show and tell.
Preparing for some fun this school holidays
Yesterday, just in time for the start of the winter school holidays, we received boxes of new stock … funky toys and novelty items, like these dog grenades. They are soft and chewy for dogs … they squeak when chewed.
We deliberately sought out a range of fun products, different to the type of products shoppers see in a newsagency, products we can make a statement with and which should sell through school holidays and transition us nicely to Father’s Day.
A couple of us selected the items carefully, chasing a specific look for the business, chasing easy impulse purchases – especially from weekend shoppers, the most lucrative shoppers we see in our centre.
It has been fun looking over the new stock items and trying some out – we have some seriously funky items.
Supermarkets take on newsagencies in the high street
Australia’s two major supermarket chains are reportedly set to open more than five hundred high-street based convenience shops which will offer the 200 top selling magazines, 200 top selling stationery items, 200 top selling greeting cards, transport tickets and ready to eat food items.
These small format convenience stores will also offer lotto products sold direct from their Point of Sale registers. Each store is to employ only local staff and will operate from 5am to 10pm.
For more information click here.