It’s good to see the Puzzler folk to run a special offer which supports Brain Awareness Week this week. Crossword and puzzle titles are ideal for promoting brain awareness issues.

Brain Awareness Week is an international effort organized by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives.

We embrace every awareness week opportunity through the year which has a connection with our range. While there is a business value in the promotion our support also demonstrates a community connection which you don’t see as often at our competitors such as Coles, Woolworths and Australia Post.

Our decision to create a new health / healthy living area between food and home magazines is paying off. Sales for the titles in this new space are up significantly over the last month. While that may in part due to a more prominent position in our busiest magazine aisle, based on the browsing we see I’d say it has more to do with a more appropriate adjacency.

In creating this new space, we merges titles from two locations into a third single location.

I see the location of magazine categories as fluid. That is, location is determined by changes in the marketplace. They provide a sense that the business is moving forward. While some customers don’t want change, these same customers will turn off the business at some point because it doesn’t change.

While the change is outside the MPA magazine layout guidelines, we take them as a guide onlyin the absence of a mroe appropriate layout – as we have now found.

We moved Notebook magazine three weeks to next to our weeklies, along with Real Living and Better Homes and Gardens. While all three have benefited from the move, Notebook has benefited the most. We sold out. These three titles challenge location guidelines – hence our decision to try them across with the weeklies. Our shopping basket data suggested this is where they belonged.

This magazine ought never have been released. No one wants to get started with Windows XP now. It’s old had. Years old hat in fact. The 8 copies sent to my newsagency with a price tag of $19.95 is a waste of my cash. We did not even put them on the shelf. We currently have sufficient titles covering XP and don’t need new stock.

If we (newsagents) were organised and had a magazine czar controlling what titles we permitted into our network the magazine distributors could not send through something like this Ultimate Guide to Windows XP.

At the Magazine Publishers of America Awards this week, retailer Wegmans received an Award for cross department promotion. Here’s what the MPA press release says:

In the promotion/cross-merchandising category, Wegmans was the Best Practices Award recipient, for implementing and supporting creative cross-merchandising opportunities across various departments, and for having a definitive cross-merchandising and promotion calendar

It’s essential that we promote magazines outside the traditional magazine retail space in our stores. Likewise it’s critical we promote other products and services within the magazine space.

Wegmans is a great business – a wonderful place to shop. Their website gives an indication of how ahead of their game they are.

I’ve talked here before about the importance of co-location. It is a very effective way for newsagents to drive sales of weekly titles. We know from sales data that these are affected by a steep decay in many newsagencies. I see some stores where 70% of sales for New Idea and Woman’s Day occur on a Monday – making what you do for the titles the other six days of minimal relevance.

It’s good to see the US publishers association reward in-store promotion in such a specific way.

It seems some petrol and convenience outlets are pulling back on the space they devote to magazines is what I and others have seen recently is anything to go off. I know of one outlet which has cut their magazine display space by 33% to 16 pockets. The duty manager says he’d be glad to see the category go altogether because “it’s nothing but trouble”. Back when the local newsagent managed the category for the outlet sales were higher and magazines were no trouble at all.

It seems the pursuit of margin by some petrol and convenience outlets is biting them at their bottom line. Maybe if they ask nicely newsagents will manage the category for them again and lift sales.

Before magazine company people call or email, I’m not claiming that all of these outlets you took off newsagents are selling less. I have spoken directly with several as have a couple of newsagent colleagues. These are outlets which initially did better and for the last six months have been in a slump – petrol outlet bosses don’t understand such slumps, they don’t understand the category.

Newsagents who had this business taken from them three years ago might get a good response if they pushed to win back the business.