New Year. Same Challenges. Less Time.

Happy New Year!

As I said here and here, we seem to have trouble with marketing and merchandising our product. In today's economic climate, and with the trouble we're having making our case to the publishing industry (media industry?) that we are still relevant, we should be delivering great products to our wholesalers, every week, in the right quantities, with great marketing plans behind them. We must be sure our wholesalers can deliver the magazines, keep them stocked, and implement the merchandising programs we've developed with them.

So that's why it's disappointing to find that in the middle of a weekend, we still see empty checkout pockets in major chain supermarkets.

Not to mention, that once again, we see the check out rack blocked by a free standing display. You can't fault the retailer for taking placement fees from other suppliers and trying to move as much product through their cash registers as they can. But at the same time, they are doing this to the detriment of another established category that has paid for their space.

At some point, we publishers are going to have to get together with our wholesalers, and do everything we can to fight for our our space and make sure our products are properly serviced. Because if we don't we'll loose the space. And that will happen.

Currently I'm working with one of my regional clients to secure checkout pockets for our title within the publisher's service area. However, the retailer is cutting pockets on the checkout fixture and does not want to include local titles. Hard to believe. But that's our reality. So before our time runs out, we need to fix this.