MagSell’06

The UK, says June Smith-Sheppard, has a greater number and variety of magazines than any other country in Europe, yet the UK magazine sector is experiencing a difficult time. Part of the problem is that publishers are not investing heavily enough in the uniqueness of their products. They need to "develop the uniqueness that grows magazine sales, rather than falling back on me-too titles, that simply cannibalise sales." Launches are the lifeblood of the industry, but a me-too title is not the way to grow sales across the category.

But it is not just the quality of the product that publishers need to be concerned with. A large part of the solution, says June, lies in enhanced collaboration between different parts of the supply chain.

In January 2005, IPC launched what it described as a "new generation real life weekly for women" - Pick Me Up. The £6m marketing budget included a national TV campaign and a huge sampling exercise; 3.5m free copies of Pick Me Up were given away with sister IPC titles Woman, Now, Chat and What’s on TV. IPC’s launch team was headed by group editorial director Mike Soutar, who had overseen the launch of Nuts the previous year. June, who had been editor of Chat, was the launch editor.

After the dust had settled on the launch and with most of the budget spent, it hit June that the task of selling the magazine was now largely out of her hands. She had to rely on wholesalers and retailers to sell the product – effectively a question of "here it is, please sell it." The ongoing task was, therefore, to work with the whole supply chain, not just the multiple head offices, to ensure that every copy of Pick Me Up had a fighting chance of being bought.

June Smith-Sheppard’s local newsagent is great! He makes informed decisions about which magazines sell and when they sell, which titles should get full facings and which shouldn’t. He clearly knows what he is doing, but June says, there must be loads of newsagents who need our help to make these informed decisions. At one newsagent, she found, to her horror, Pick Me Up sandwiched between the TV titles. Completely wrong and a tragic waste of all those hard selling coverlines. In that particular shop, the only chance a prospective Pick Me Up purchaser had of finding the title would be if they got down on their hands and knees, or if they happened to be also looking for a TV title or if they asked an assistant. Possible … but not likely.

Intelligent placement is one side of the coin, but June thinks that retailers should also pro-actively sell magazines – where appropriate. Why shouldn’t a newsagent suggest Investors Chronicle, for example, to a regular purchaser of the FT? Also, the NFRN’s home news delivery scheme could be opened up to magazines (something which, I believe, the NFRN is encouraging its members to do).

Just watching

June confesses to spending some time in newsagents just watching people’s behaviour at the magazine racks. She’s intrigued to see what they do – if they pick up a title, then put it down, what do they move on to? "I still can’t resist watching people buy magazines; we don’t know enough about our prospective purchasers." What are the triggers? What factors boost sales, and what depress them?

"As an editor, I spend as much time as possible with my potential readers. Furthermore, we spend hours making sure that every picture we publish and every word we use connects with our readers – but do we ask the same questions of ourselves with regards to our retail display?" June clearly thinks that publishers are not applying the same rigour in ensuring the optimum possible display as they do in ensuring that every ‘i’ and ‘t’ of their copy is dotted and crossed. Which is all a bit mad really, when you consider that the hours spent hammering out the front cover and crafting all those teasing coverlines can be completely wasted by poor placement.

Solutions

To conclude, the solutions June touched upon were:

* build a better knowledge of your reader
* educate the retailer about your title and its place on his shelves
* communicate better and more regularly with all elements of the supply chain
* develop systems to ensure that retailers get copy when they need it, and, as part of this, we need to accelerate the roll-out of sales based replenishment (SBR)
* consider alternative routes to market, because, says June, if a man doesn’t smoke or eat chocolate there is little reason for him to go into a newsagent, but, if that same man is also a keen fisherman, then he might just notice the angling title on display at the shop he buys his bait from.

There is no doubt June would personally put her magazine directly into the hands of the customer, if she could – but she can’t. She has to rely on the retailer. The lesson is that publishers need to put as much effort into ensuring that their point of sale is right, as they put into all the other areas of the production process.