Tactical display

Last week, we introduced a range of health related magazine titles for display in the section under our women’s weeklies titles.

This location receives the highest traffic in our magazine department. sales of the health titles placed here should increase. For each title it’s the second location in-store.

We use this space below weeklies to feature titles outside their usual location.

For most titles we run here it works, delivering incremental sales of the featured titles.  The times it does not work we learn for the future.

The biggest success we had was when we move craft titles here. In fact, the success was so great that we found a space to permanently locate the category opposite the weeklies. We made that move seven months ago. The result has been a 52% increase in sales for the category. Craft titles now account for 10% of all magazine we sell.

We can make more money from magazines.

Click on the image for a larger version.

Food magazines account for 4% of our overall magazine sales and sales are up year on year. One reason is our obsession with placement. we ensure that appropriate titles are next to each other. Take our foodie titles, we place them in a line with the full cover on show. It’s careful placement like this that helps drive shopper efficiency – getting people to purchase more than one title.

By taking time and being deliberate about what titles we place next to each other, we can increase sales. This is another reason we need the right people putting out magazines – it’s not a menial task … indeed, it can be the difference between magazine sales growth and decline.

deliberate magazine placement ought to be the goal of every newsagent.

We have been promoting The Independent Guide to the iPad Mini magbook placed upright next to / in front of The Age.

We decided on this placement since it’s a title shoppers are not like to be looking for – we need to find them with high traffic location placement.

We have had Time magazine next to The Age, believing the cover story on US drones would appeal to these customers. We check the cover of Time to see where it could work best as it’s a title we sell better on impulse.

We have adjusted the display of women’s health titles, ensuring well selling and promoted brands get good positioning. What you see in the photo and beyond is part of our regular magazine placement work.

I do this myself as it’s something to think about away from the daily work of putting magazines and taking titles off for return. It requires consideration of data and the focus of the business. It’s work that helps drive year on year growth of magazine sales.

If People’s Friend magazine is big in your newsagency check where the two issues currently on the shelves are placed. They should be next to each other. This way you can parlay the $3.00 weekly issue purchase into a bonus purchase of the Christmas special issue.

I have found over the years that full cover display of the two issues next to each other works well at driving sales efficiency.

I usually place Organic magazine with gardening magazines.  When I saw it is a shop earlier this week with food titles I realised I had been making a mistake. This is a magazine foodies will purchase, especially if they are into organic food. So, I am changing location and following the better location – with food.

Our placement of Your Garden magazine with newspapers has achieved a sell-through of 72% in the two weeks since we placed it with newspapers.  This simple move has achieved excellent sales growth for us in this two-week period.  All we did was move the title from garden magazines to next to newspapers. It cost us a minute or two of time and the pay-off is sales we would otherwise not have achieved. Yes, we can grow magazine sales.

We have these two Homespun titles next to each other in our high-profile quilting and crafts section. It makes sense as the shopper looking at one will usually browse the second … and that’s the best step toward a purchase.

Australian Homespun is a hero product in this category. The actual placement of the two titles in the photo is the bext in the category. Note that the full cover is on display. I consider this to be important for craft titles showing off the goal of engaging in the hobby.

We are displaying the latest issues of Better Homes and Gardens and Your Garden with weekend newspapers this weekend – the former because it sells very well on weekends and the latter because of the FREE seed pod which comes with the latest issue.

There is a third reason we considered with the selection – the two covers work well next to each other. We take this into account with each placement.

What we put with newspapers is important for driving the best value possible from a newspaper purchase.

We are experimenting with a new feature magazine display in our men’s magazine area.

Our men’s magazine space is located to the rear of the store and has resulted in double digit growth in men’s magazine sales since we set this up in September last year … a terrific success story based on our magazine relay.

For some time I have wanted to leverage the traffic in this space and see if we can drive impulse purchases of titles not usually displayed here. So, using a free-standing display unit, we are giving the My Kitchen Rules cookbook 2 a shot in our men’s magazine area.

As the photo shows we are taking a simple approach – placing the title in the middle of the floor space, kind like a speed hump. We are supporting this with little collateral. So, it really is abot interrupting the flow and hoping that this is enough for guys and those shopping with guys to take a look at the off-location offer.

We will track sales based on pocket counting.  Our plan is to try a series of titles over the next month to see if the placement of this unit on the shop floor works for us.

Click on the image for a larger version.

With weekly magazines accounting for 25% of our magazine sales, we are always looking for ways to leverage the excellent traffic they attract by promoting other titles with them and nearby.  We have recently been using a simple acrylic stand next to and above the weeklies to promote titles which we cannot fit in the stand next to the weeklies. Over the weekend we were promoting Weight Watchers magazine. You can see it in the photo.

We choose the titles we place here, above the weeklies, carefully. We want titles which are a natural fit and which have a track record of being purchased in our newsagency on impulse – we know this from other campaigns.

We have another of these acrylic stands in use above our crossword section which is at the other end of this aisle.

We count the number of copies we put into each of the displays so that we can track the success or otherwise of the title being promoted in this location. This is vital so that we build a data set of what works and what does not work.

Newsagencies are the best magazine destinations in Australia. We all should leverage this and pursue the best possible sales efficiency from magazine shoppers. This means obsessing abut the category and changing how we display, promote and leverage magazines.

I was looking for some different magazines to promote with newspapers for a few days to change things up a bit. When I saw the cover of Food Network Magazine and Wine Companion the decision was easy. Chocolate and wine are favourites with many people … aren’t they?

I think it is important to give lower volume titles time in the spotlight. Besides being good for the titles, it is good for us as it shows products which customers may not know we carry and may not go looking for.

We make moves like this for one reason only – to drive sales.  We try and leverage key traffic drivers, like newspapers, to achieve sales of other products, like these two magazines this week.

The latest issue of Mad magazine has a cover story (well, not so much a story but a spoof in Mad tradition) on the popular Modern family TV show. We are tapping into the opportunity by placing the full cover on display. This makes sense since we’re serving an area where we suspect the show would be quite popular.

Mad is picked up by people interested in the target of a cover story, I’ve seen this happen several times. The key is to get the magazine in front of those people. Hence the need to consider where the title will work best.

For this issue of Mad I am thinking with TV Week for some copies at least. Sometimes a tactical placement can work better than a flashy display. Eyeballs is all you need and it’s what you place a magazine or a product next to which can work a treat.

We have the terrific display unit from Pacific Magazines at the front of the newsagency facing into the shopping mall driving traffic and impulse purchases. Pacific gets these units right and has done for years. The display units are strong, easy to setup and well designed to tell a story and attract eyeballs.

We move the display unit to different locations to combat store blindness from regular shoppers and ourselves.  So, right now it is out the front.  We moved it there from next to our main newspaper display.

This type of limited life impulse purchase unit works well as it looks fresh.  Plus it’s clear to the team members what titles go in the unit.

We are promoting the latest issue of Australian Traveller magazine with this simple but high traffic location display in one of my newsagencies.

Australian Traveller is a relatively small Australian title delivering nice sales growth.  I urge newsagents to check out how they are supporting the title?   Give it a good spot – it’s a title customers love once they find it.

This is not a title to early return.

Place it next to newspapers (like we have this week) or with women’s weekly titles. It needs more eyeballs than the travel section gets. Women purchase more vacation travel than men so putting it with New Idea and Woman’s Day makes sense.

Over this past weekend we created this simple co-location display of key music magazines. The display is is located opposite our newspapers and will see more foot traffic than where music magazines are located.

While music magazine sales are good, up on last year, we want to drive an even greater increase.  Hence the positioning of them in this high traffic location for the next couple of weeks.

We are also taking the opportunity to look at what other titles are available to us to expand the range. We are better placed to do this than a magazine distributor deciding for us what new titles we could sell.

While we gave music magazines good positioning in our magazine relay in September, I am not happy with where they are and am keen to find a better location. As always, space is the challenge.

We are opportunistically promoting the current issue of The Wiggles magazine with the now sacked Wiggle on the cover.  I’m hoping it could be a bit of a collectors item. It should be given the considerable controversy over the last couple of weeks following the sacking and the pro handling of it by the Wiggles organisation. So, we have the magazine in a good location with the full cover on show.

We are running a pretty simple placement promoting of a range of car and motorbike magazines at one of our sales counters.  We are tracking the quantity of each title to see what is working from this location. Three magazines in two days so far. I’m happy with that given that some or all of these will be incremental business.

I see plenty of newsagencies where the weeklies are located in these front of shop locations. I am not a fan of that. In this particular newsagency we have our weeklies located at the half way point in the shop and sales continue to grow. So far this month, comparing to January 2011, sales are up 14%.

But back to the car magazines. I chose to place them at the counter as they reflect a category which is usually only browsed y destination browsers or shoppers. I wanted to get this subset of our range in front of more shoppers so that they are aware of what we carry. Hence the placement at the counter for this week.

We are regularly looking at our counter and what we have placed in front of shoppers who are making a purchase. We like to make changes at least weekly, to keep our offer fresh and to drive sales.