The Magazine Publishers of Australia executive director Mary Ann Azer in an interview stated that they were revising their submission to the Australian Competition Consumer Commission (ACCC). They dispute the claim made at the meeting that supermarkets pick their magazine stock, but state that supermarkets choose their range. Something I can believe as supermarkets would tend to say, this is your allocated space, fill it, and it better be good. Whether such a model is transferable to a magazine specialist like a newsagency is an interesting question. What exactly does the MPA mean by range is another? The Wikipedia here thinks they are the same but does the MPA; I am not sure?
What they are proposing is for the shops on trial "redesigning those stores, looking at category education, how you revamp the shelf, look at the adjacencies and the category and use all the shopper insights to develop the layout of the magazines in these stores,” something that I hope people here keep an open mind on. Surely it would be interesting to see what they come up with?
The MAP also claims, "We have the support of the Australian Newsagents Federation (ANF),” which I thought was interesting. When I was at the meeting, the ANF seemed to be giving qualified support.
Finally as I stated in my early posts and at the ACCC meeting the MPA is not ready to start these tests and Azer did state in the interview on behalf of the MPA "it was the MPA itself who had pushed it back from a planned April start to a May 25 start date......We ourselves pushed it to May 25 because we had a lot of data to analyse.”
The full interview is available here.
