I am not a regular reader of the 'Mail on Sunday'.
However this Sunday was different -we went to four different newsagents before we could find a copy. And the reason it had sold out was its special offer of the new Prince CD. Later that day I went to a barbecue - they had a copy of it there and everyone talked about it.
What a coup for the Mail on Sunday - amidst all the noise of special/free/two-for-the-price-of-one/unique serialisations/holiday offers and all the other nonsense the news industry use to supposedly woo us to buy their papers, the MoS was head and shoulders above the rest - I wouldn't describe it as a 'once in a life-time offer' but it was pretty good (if you like Prince).
As a result, will the MoS get more people switching to buy their paper more often? I don't know...Or were they just trying to increase sales for one week?
At its simplest, to grow a business you can:
- Increase the size of the market - and this offer must have got more people buying the Sunday papers if only temporarily, or
- Take customers from your competitors - I am sure that this did that, if only temporarily.
- Get more customers (expensive)
- Get existing customers to buy more (easier)
- Get existing customers to but more often (sometimes easy - unless you are a funeral director or divorce lawyer)
- Stop customers leaving.
It seems that the MoS gets ticks in all four boxes. But will this tactic improve their sales in the long run?
Chris Garrett also saw the MoS and uses it as a catalyst to ask Does Your Website Have These Friendly Features? . He asks, "Take a good look at the picture above. What do you see? Consider what the publishers have done. Can you understand how they draw us in?" Worth reading.
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4 comments:
The Prince giveaway definitely represents one of the ways forward. It is a variation of advertising supported music, which will be the principal revenue stream of the future recorded music industry.
Check out the Ad-Supported Music Central blog:
http://ad-supported-music.blogspot.com/
Marc
Ad-supported music is the way forward? How does Prince make his money from an offer like the in the Mail on Sunday? Surely the more traditional routes to market would pay him better. After all, how much do we value a freebie?
Robert
Runours in London say that HMV and Virgin Music had to buy out whole newsagents' copies of the Mail on Sunday so that the record stores could sell the 'Paper + CD' pack to their own customers!
Marc
Ad-supported music is the way forward? How does Prince make his money from an offer like the in the Mail on Sunday? Surely the more traditional routes to market would pay him better. After all, how much do we value a freebie?
Robert
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