New Initiatives Focus on Retail Efficiency, Communication

By Jerry Lynch, President, IPDA 

Welcome to Newsstand Forum. The name of this new, monthly enewsletter reflects its primary goal: To provide a communications vehicle for all partners in the magazine and book distribution channels, from publisher through retailer, as we work together to address our challenges and leverage our strengths.

With your participation, your voices, we will aim to explore issues and opportunities honestly and constructively. 

Communication has never been more important. The reading category—magazines, in particular—now has a critical window of opportunity at retail.

Change is a constant. The question is whether we’ll cooperate effectively to ensure that our initiatives result in positive long-term outcomes for all…especially the ultimate customer, our reader.

Retailers are asking the magazine category to reexamine the relationships and practices in our supply chain to improve sell-through and efficiencies relating to labor expended throughout the chain, speed to market, transportation and other areas.

IPDA’s board believes that such initiatives require broad participation, and that any potential solutions or best practices must be scalable across the supply chain and the variety of retailers it services.

Therefore, we are sponsoring a two-day meeting with the purpose of forming a committee of publishers, national distributors and wholesalers to facilitate positive change, starting with addressing inefficiencies. This kick-off meeting is scheduled for mid-March.

At the same time, we’re working together to get the category’s very strong story out to retailers in a cohesive, comprehensive manner.

As the results of the recent Willard Bishop Grocery SuperStudy show—this issue brings you some first highlights—magazines stack up extremely well against other categories in profitability and other performance metrics. We have a unique product that is not only highly valued by consumers, but helps drive their purchases of other products at retail. However, as an industry, we have not been nearly effective enough at conveying these facts to the retail community.

Now, we’re engaged in collaborative development of a presentation of the category’s strengths that can be used by all publisher and distributor executives in contacts with retailers. We’ve dubbed this the “One Voice” initiative.

IPDA members are working on a first draft, which should be ready for input from the wholesaler and publisher communities at the MPA/IPDA Retail Conference at the end of March.

We look forward to seeing all of you at the Retail Conference, and we’ll keep you updated on these initiatives in future issues.