In the increasingly brutal battle for retail sales, the strategy for publishers – along with the manufacturers of everything from biscuits to laundry liquid – has changed little with the passing of time: to be heard by the greatest number of shoppers, shout that bit louder than all your competitors. The problem is that with all the shouting, it’s harder than ever for a single voice to be heard; the din of brand voices – and the barrage of signage around the newsstand – has become a blur that not only fails in many cases to lift sales, it can actually obstruct a sale.
Bargain hunters
This is at a time when shoppers, hardened by the economic upheaval of the past two years, have grown especially adept at hunting down a bargain; Mintel research shows that among the supermarket chains, discounters Aldi and Lidl are growing at double the rate of the other national networks. Over a third of UK shoppers choose which store they shop at depending on special offers or discounts, and in some categories, consumers are simply not buying unless there’s a sale on – 47% of consumers say they only buy clothes that have been reduced.
In this climate, consumer magazines are among the items feeling the squeeze of tighter budgets for discretionary spending. Recently released ABC figures for the second half of 2010 show the circulation of the top 100 paid-for titles declining by 4.1%. While there were winners and losers amongst them – some 38 managed to increase sales volume – the overall picture was a less-than-happy one, although circulations seem not to be shrinking at the same rate as for national and regional newspapers.
“Frequency of purchase is the big issue; a lot of the softness in many markets isn’t due to people dropping out of the market but purchase frequency,” says Jim Bilton, managing partner of publishing consultancy Wessenden Marketing.
The number of consumer titles being published – about 3,000 – has changed little in the past few years, and 87% of the UK population read magazines, according to data compiled by the PPA. That figure rises to 91% of people aged 15 to 24. Yet the retail sales value of those magazines, measured as a three-month rolling average, is now under £120 million; five years ago, it was hovering around the £150 million mark.
“It’s very difficult to know what to do in the retail space,” says Bilton. “I think there’s an awareness of the need to do something more creative with promotions. There’s a lot of head-scratching and thinking going on.” The head-scratching is accompanied by a good bit of hand-wringing; publishers face intense pressure from retailers to maintain a certain level of spending on point-of-sale promotions to maintain their presence in powerful newsagents and supermarkets. That pressure to spend consistently probably contributes to the apparent consistency of noise at the newsstand when it comes to promotional materials. "If you invest in the same retail mechanics year in year out they sometimes become less effective every time you do it", notes Martin Hoskins, head of newstrade marketing, BBC Magazines.
Consumers on a mission
Distributor Marketforce has been asking consumers what helps them find or decide on a title when they shop, and what turns them off. Christina Lucas, marketing services and international director, says anything that looks untidy drives traffic away. If stock isn’t replenished and tidied often enough, they are less likely to buy; anything that helps shoppers quickly find a category or a particular title is welcomed. Different promotional mechanics have varying degrees of success dependent largely on the “shopping mission” an individual is on.
“The newscube clearly works well for those who are also buying a newspaper and can potentially drive impulse buying,” Lucas says. “It doesn't, however, work well for those wanting to browse, or who are unsure of what to buy. This is because they feel that they are getting in the way of those people who want to grab their newspaper and go.” Material that highlights ‘recommended reads’ often had zero effect; 53% of shoppers Marketforce interviewed across a range of stores said they hadn’t seen the signage, and a further 27% said they took no notice of what a store recommended.
Mindset and this sense of mission is a bigger factor than demographics in the success or not of retail activity, Lucas says, but men tend to browse longer than women, so mechanics that allow more browsing for men’s titles are ideal, while those that drive cross-purchase impulse buying would work better for women. Till-point displays worked well with women’s titles, but men were more focused on unpacking their trolleys at this point and took little notice of any magazines there. “The more expensive special interest titles will similarly dictate more browsing, as shoppers want to feel confident that they are buying the best title on offer. Promotions that flag up content work well here,” she says.
Wedding bells
While there are murmurings about exciting new retail mechanics that are in the pipeline, little that’s truly new has emerged in the past couple of years, other than Tesco checkout units, which are apparently generating good results but are hardly revolutionary. “There’s a feeling in the air that something needs to be done,” says one industry insider. “At the moment, lots of sales are being built around the royal wedding, but we don’t have a royal wedding every six months.”
The popularity of covermounts seems to have waned this year; consumer boredom probably set in at about the time when three women’s mags simultaneously offered free flip-flops on the cover. Multipacks seem to have stuck around, however; their appeal to the bargain-conscious consumer is clear. The disincentive to stop pairing titles is that one of the pair is likely to suffer plunging circulation immediately afterwards.
More imagination needed
Research for the PPA aimed at improving retail sales of magazines found that while retailers consider the magazine category to be fun, complex, varied and responsive to social trends, it can also be brand-centric to the detriment of the category, and unimaginative when it comes to promotions. As one retailer told the PPA, “Publishers do not do promotions. They just buy shelf space and point of sale material.” Retailers also complain that promotions are too rarely tailored to the store. “We are not all the same. One size does not fit all,” said a retail respondent to the PPA’s recent survey.
Lucas points out that the consumer mindset is very different in a supermarket – where a shopper is in bargain-hunt mode and is surrounded by price deals they expect to see carried on into the magazine category – to a newsagent, where the reason for entering in the first place is often specifically to buy a magazine.
“Magazines are way behind other categories on this,” says Charlotte Macleod, retail director of COMAG. “The majority of publishers still launch national promotions, not tailored by retailer, store type or channel. There are more opportunities there, particularly with the growth in convenience shopping.”
Penny pinching
Attempts to make magazines stand out in a retail environment are stifled less by lack of will than lack of funds, says Bilton. “Retailers say they like it when you try to do something different… but that all the publishers want to do is buy off the ratecard,” he says. “But the publishers want to spend as little as possible, and sticking to the ratecard is probably the safe way of doing that.”
The BBC’s Hoskins says it needn’t be so. Their retail promotions taking magazine titles to different parts of a store that match the content – rather than just sticking with the magazines area, has brought large uplifts in sales, he says. Food titles go well with barbecues, and gardening titles with outdoor items in summer, for instance. “There’s so much noise at retail, it’s quite difficult to get that cut-through you want,” he says. “It’s got to be focused on bigger, fewer, more impactful promotions.”
This is a technique being used by other categories, too; drinks giant Diageo has been successful in boosting sales of spirits by putting tonic water and lemon with their gin, and Baileys with chocolates for a ready-made gift. Hoskins says it’s a challenge to know whether the extra sales come from impulsive buyers who wouldn't ordinarily have brought the titles, or are from readers who buy occasionally deciding to buy more frequently. It’s invariably both.
But before all the parenting titles move to the nappy aisle and the lads mags pop up with the beer, dual siting of magazines creates some new headaches for retailers when it comes to keeping displays well stocked. Freestanding units in non-magazine areas need frequent monitoring, and as publishers want to keep their regular slots in the magazine area as well as venturing elsewhere in the store, this adds significantly to the workload for retailers.
Number crunching
The wealth of data that many stores now have on their customers’ shopping habits is a resource that’s being tapped by manufacturers in other categories; purchase patterns can be used to predict the magazines that an individual consumer might like, and vouchers for those titles generated on till receipts. Coupons generally are booming; Valassis, a major coupon and voucher services provider, redeemed £499 million worth of coupons in 2010, a rise of 25% on a year earlier. The main data providers in supermarkets are Dunnhumby, for Tesco, and Nectar, for Sainsbury’s. Some magazines have started to trial this kind of activity, but it’s expensive, so tends only to be within reach of the largest publishers. Hoskins says it works well to lift sales but those sales tend to fall back again after the activity. “The technology is there to do all kinds of smart stuff… it just costs a lot of money,” says Bilton.
COMAG’s Macleod says there’s scope for better use of data in magazine promotions. “Publishers still are not as joined up as they could be with their planning and implementation of on-shelf or in-mag promotions working with loyalty card data and vouchering plans,” she says. “There’s real opportunity to truly optimise their investments by joining all these elements up.”
The PPA is leading the charge towards better results at retail, focusing on creating higher value rather than higher volume, through better use of data, measurement and dialogue with retailers about training and display. Part of the organisation’s push has seen the launch of a section on its website aimed at retailers. A campaign called ‘Just Ask’, which has been trialled with Smiths News, is now ready for national roll-out. Just Ask encourages consumers to ask for titles that aren’t stocked, either for home delivery or to be saved for collection in shops. The PPA is providing artwork for in-store display.
What might prove the touchpaper to reigniting this category at retail, however, is cooperation between publishers and distributors. Joint Christmas promotions by TV listings magazines have become a regular fixture on the calendar. Hoskins says he’s working with Frontline on programmes that can regenerate magazines more broadly, rather than focus on specific titles. “The approach we’re taking is about trying to get the category to grow,” he says. “If the category is in growth, the majority of the brands within it will grow. And that supports the retailer as well.”
