At our Frankston newsagency we are promoting renovation magazines at the counter. The stand carries twelve to sixteen different titles from the category – all titles which would not usually be promoted at the counter.The idea behind this type of display, besides selling magazines, is to showcase that we are a local business – as opposed to a corporate which does pretty and clinical display.
We have Melbourne Formal magazine in our Forest Hill and Frankston stores. It’s a challenging title to locate. While it looks like it would be more at home in with wedding magazines, we have placed Melbourne Formal with the higher volume weeklies since we suspect this is closer to the market for the title. Mums and daughters frocking up for formals are probably not looking for such a specialist title.
We are giving prominence to the BBC Top Gear magazine in advance of the launch of the Australian edition by ACP Magazines in a month or so. This week, the imported edition of Top Gear has been featured above the Herald Sun. Next week, it will be another high profile location. Our goal is that when the local title launches, consumers in our area will think of us ahead of other outlets because they will have seen the title in our shop previously.
The team at or Frankston store have gone wild in creating their BIG BOYS TOYS magazine display. Surrounding the stand with Street Machine, Motor, Wheels and other magazines, they have stuck on models of toys – cars, motor bikes, boats … all manner of big boys toys.
Our approach to this type of display is evolving – we’re chasing as much fun in creating the display as we are aiming for from the customer reaction.
Check out the video produced by the Periodical Publishers Association in the UK to promote Magazine Week.
Magazine Week (Sept. 29 – Oct. 5) this year links with The National Year of Reading in an effort to boost literacy.Magazine Week is a great initiative. It boosts attention on magazines and the literacy connection underscores value beyond guilty pleasure.
It’s great to see Pacific Magazines getting behind Who magazine with a major TV campaign. This gives us something to play in-store to draw attention to the title and connect with what consumers will have seen on TV.
Who is an important title not only for the product itself but also its Friday release. This drives additional weekend traffic.
We have an arrangement with The Flower Hut, a florist in Frankston. They have provided a nice display for our counter as a prize for a lucky customer. In return we promote their business in a good location in-store.  A prize like a bunch of flowers for Mother’s Day is great. It’s practical. Also, being local, there is a greater sense that one could win. It shows that you don;t need to go over the top with a seasonal promotion.
Like everyone involved in the title, we’re concerned about the future of Australian Women’s Weekly. While no one will talk about it publicly, sales are in a slump. Customers tell us it’s because of the product itself, people say it has lost its way with its key demographic.
AWW remains the most redeemed title selected by customers using our Magazine Club Card where we giveaway a magazine if you buy eleven within eight weeks.
While ACP settles in the latest changes to steer the AWW ship, we’re taking a different approach with promoting the title – this month we have it right at the front of the shop, over our lease line in fact. We used to do this for single titles years ago but moves away from it because of the cost of the space.
The display in the photo has been out for most of the week and sales have been good. We will maintain the single title display s long as it works.
We are promoting Australian Women’s Weekly at our counter this weekend – buy the magazine and get a free Darrell Lea chocolate bar. We’re funding this ourselves to promote the title as well as the Darrell Lea range.  While we have some some through the promotion, it’s not setting our customers on fire.
Girlfriend is featured as Magazine of the Month in our April customer newsletter. We also promote our refreshed card and wrap offer, Annette Sym’s Symply Too Good 5 and other products we’re glad to get behind.
This newsletter is simple to put together. We use Microsoft Word. Some of it is corporate but most is local to our newsagency. It is an passive, effective (and free) marketing tool for our business, customers ask about items we promote.
Here are some sales/marketing tips for Easter which I put together a week ago for Tower Systems users – I share it here in case some visitors find the ideas useful. Some are old chestnuts and others are, well, different.
Egg Hunt. Invite families in to hunt your store for eggs on one day. Make this a big event. Get the local paper to take some photos. Let the school, kinder and other groups know.
Easter Bonnet Parade. Invite oldies groups, retirement villages and similar places in to do a parade. This could be on the same day as the egg hunt. The more groups you involve the more your name will spread in the community.
Colouring contest. An oldie and a goodie. Get a good image and hive kids colour it in. The key is to display all the entries – note on the form that you will display all entries as this gets parents coming in to look at the work of their kids.
Easter of all nations. Invite your customers to write about Easter from the perspective of their nationality. Keep the brief histories to a page. See how many countries you can get represented. This could really help cross cultural boundaries and connect people who otherwise may not have met.
Window decoration. Invite a school class or kinder to paint your window in an Easter theme.
Egg race. Put a big chocolate egg on a small spoon and see who can race a distance around the shop without dropping the egg.
How to make a bonnet. Create an advice sheet or some flyer which helps people participate in Easter. There are other sheets you could do: why send an Easter card or traditional Easter meals etc. The more knowledgeable and useful you appear the more people will rely in you for seasonal connections.
Of course, the various events noted could all be done on the one day, creating something wonderful for all ages.
Easter is close and we have our Darrell Lea range out including this Thomas The Tank package. It includes an activity as well as the egg which is good. I’m curious about the management of brands such as Thomas since we access the eggs from one place, cards and bags from another, books another and toys another. While it’s impractical to have them all come through one supplier, it would be good if there was a more co-ordinated approach.
We are experimenting with category based aisle displays at our Frankston store.
While this does not serve individual titles well and will frustrate some publishers, it allows us to showcase a category of titles and thereby, hopefully, introduce customers to dept of range they may not have seen before.
This type of display, covering several titles in a category, demonstrated our point of difference. While I want the top selling titles to do well, I need the lower volume titles, the titles other retailers shun, to do well too. Lower volume titles are out point of difference.
Yen is benefiting from this work. People drawn to the display with Marie Claire and Vogue as centrepieces see Yen and are buying it. Vogue sell too, but it would anyway.
What is happening with Yen is interesting to me because two or three years ago, newsagents were paid a pittance by a company called InSite to promote Yen. InSite arrange for considerably more stock. The cost of carrying this and the space required was not covered by the small marketing fee paid. The InSite approach was a failure, not worth the additional cost. Now, through what we’re doing at Frankston, where we have the space available for such displays, we are achieving better results for Yen.
I wish publishers and distributors would reward newsagents for growth. Rewarding success and treating us as business people would see more newsagents make better business decisions. InSite was based around a micro fee for compliance. Our approach at Frankston has nothing to do with compliance – it’s about what’s good for the business.
Here are some free Valentine’s Day marketing tips for newsagents included in the Tower Systems weekly email bulletin sent yesterday:
Kissing booth: raise money for a local charity, $2.00 a kiss;Â Make sure it looks like an old style booth.
Red lips: paint some big red lips on the side of your face for the day and ask for a donation to a local charity;
Sweethearts candy: put a tray of the old style sweethearts candy at the counter and offer one to each customer;
Graffiti wall: It could be paper, a window or a white board, encourage customers to write messages of love. For this idea to work, it has to be bold. We’ve already had positive feedback on this idea.
Each of these Valentine’s Day marketing tips is about engaging with customers and that’s what retail is all about. These regular marketing tips are a free service for Tower Newsagents and others to use as they feel appropriate. We are happy for the ideas to be passed on. It’s our way of adding value to our newsagency relationship.
We tend to focus on ideas which can be implemented locally and without cost. We especially like ideas which add to the fun and theatre of business.
Newsagents wanting to really get behind Chinese New Year this year ought to check out www.chinatown.com.au – it’s an excellent source of products to support in-store displays as well as products to sell such as the popular red packets. You need to sign up in order to access the site as a retailer.
We are planning to rein in the real-estate taken by magazine merchandisers in our newsagency. While we welcome their displays, now more than ever they are promoting titles away from their location. The result is visual noise which can detract from the category which owns the space.
Take a look at the photo I took on Saturday. It shows a great poster display promoting Elevator magazine and another promoting Home Beautiful. Elevator is promoted next to our astrology and markets sections while Home Beautiful is next to camping and crossword titles – both displays are a full aisle away from the titles being promoted.
We have allowed this situation to evolve over many years – what we have today, four of these merchandise displays, is our fault. At first, the displays were welcome because they covered otherwise blank space. Now, we’d prefer some quiet between the visual noise of magazine displays.
I don’t think this merchandising sells magazines. I’d like to see those investing in this merchandising met with newsagents to consider an investment more appropriate to today’s retail needs and which does drive sales. I’d certainly like to participate in such a discussion.
What I want is to sell more magazines. I think I can do this through smarter partnering with publishers and distributors – partnering which reflects today’s retail trends.
Today I witnessed the commercial value of being obsessive about magazines.
Let me set the scene: when I saw the photo of Bindi Irwin on the cover of Holidays with Kids last week I moved it from our travel section to this stand on the dance floor, between newspapers and the counter. At that stage we had all four copies.
We sold the second last of the four copies received this morning – the customer told me she bought it because of the Bindi Irwin cover. She came in to buy Who and the Herald Sun. Had we left Holidays with Kids in the travel section, this customer would have missed out and we would have returned, most likely, all four copies.
While the value of real-estate on the dance floor is higher than the travel section, an impulse purchase of Holidays with Kids reinforces newsXpress Forest Hill as a go to place for magazines. This is why we obsess about magazines and why we cheer when we see specific evidence of commercial success, even a small step, from that obsession.
Covers drive us in our obsession. If we, any of us, see a cover which permits the title to be co-located, especially into a higher traffic area, we go for it. Sure it takes extra time – we see this as the job of a magazine specialist.
The newsagency brand is in trouble. Right there, in that sentence, is the problem: Newsagency is not a brand. It used to be. For over 100 years it was the brand on main street. The newsagent was someone special and the business the go to place for stationery, newspapers, magazines and cards.
In the 1970s and 1980s as more shopping malls opened and some main streets started to fade, newsagencies started to lose consistency. The push of newspapers and magazines into other outlets in the 1980s, 90s and this century has driven fading consistency in newsagencies.
Years ago, industry associations tried to reinforce this by creating the N logo. The idea of the N logo was to make it a mechanism for discipline. That failed a few years ago and it is to late not to apply discipline which has been treated so poorly by so many.
My view that newsagency as a brand is no longer was reinforced this week when I visited three newsagencies in the space of two hours and saw three very different businesses. One was a dirty dingy trash heap which should be closed, the other a stunning business and the third a shop more focused on cheap product from China than traditional newsagency lines. While these businesses are entitled to call themselves what they like, good newsagents would cringe that two of the three share the newsagency shingle.
So, the newsagency brand is dead. Smart newsagents will brand themselves as something else, something which is backed with appropriate discipline and which can separate their business from the two newsagencies I saw earlier this week.
This is why marketing groups are essential to the future of the channel. Marking groups have the mechanisms of discipline – franchise agreements and the like. One of the reasons I joined newsXpress is for the discipline. I had been in a couple of groups before where there was no discipline. To me, a marketing group must have balls to toss out members who do not meet standards – otherwise the brand is weak – just as the newsagency shingle is weak.
Newsagents who are not part of a marketing group are relegated to being grouped with others trading under the newsagency shingle. In that group you have some of the best newsagents in the country and some of the worst and therein lies the problem.
I common question I get from newsagents reading this is: how do you lay your counter to drive impulse sales? While the counter changes several times during the week, the elements are the same and best shown in this photo I took Saturday:
We have three key serving areas – one to the front and two to the right. At each point there are upsell opportunities. At the corner of the counter, the newspaper, magazine and Darrell Lea stands work well at attracting impulse purchases.
We obsess about this space – to the point where we are discussing with a designer to create a single stand to replace the four stands we use at present. A more corporate yet flexible feel will, we think, help us sell more from this space.
Take a look at the best promotional poster you’ll see for the 2007 Rugby World Cup:
newsXpress newsagencies are getting behind this sporting event as a show of support for the Wallabies and to inject some fun into their stores.
By connecting with major events such as the Rugby World Cup, newsXpress is strengthening the community connection for its stores and taking promotion beyond the traditional newsagency seasons.
Disclosure: I am a Director of newsXpress Pty Ltd
Newsagents are excited by the promotional opportunities of Kachingo, a soon to launch customer rewards program unlike any other currently operating in Australia. Given the newsagent interest and the opportunity for solid business growth being driven by Kachingo, we are ensuring that the Tower Systems newsagent software supports Kachingo from launch. The appropriate link will be released as part of a software update and at no cost to newsagents.
The Source, a newsagency of the future in Melbourne has received excellent coverage in Inside Retailing. Newsagents ought to read the article and visit the store.
While the future the owners of The Source are pursuing may not be for everyone, their choices are bound to inspire newsagents to consider their own plans for the future.
Who seems back on track after the dip last week when Paris Hilton was on the cover. Maybe it’s only around my newsagency that Paris is a sales turn off but I doubt it.
The Victorian branch of GNS, the stationery wholesaler owned by newsagents, is offering a 10% discount on a stationery order to any newsagent joining Newspower, the marketing group for newsagents now controlled by GNS, in July.
I own shares in GNS as do most newsagents – I acquired the shares, units back then, as part of a mandatory levy on every purchase through GNS. It is disappointing that GNS is using profit from my business and other non Newspower newsagents to support Newspower and that they are doing this while blocking competition. As I blogged here last week, GNS has banned newsXpress from its trade shows, the only trade shows for newsagents in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Newsagents are benefiting from competition between Newspower, newsXpress, Nextra and others. Each group is improving its offering as a result of competition. A strong Newspower would not need protecting nor the 10% stationery discount deal like is being offered in Victoria at present.