COVER POWER

AL HELLER

Wegmans does it.

So do A&P and Marsh.

Giant Food and Safeway do it too.

They all draw on the power of magazine covers as consumer magnets, showcasing titles throughout the store to make shoppers think before walking past displays of health care, cosmetics, specialty foods, cigars, wines and more.

Why not?

There's a specialty magazine for any topic. After all, titles have soared to 4,500 from 2,600 at the start of the decade.

Rather than rely only on mainline displays running up to 60 feet, retailers see the weakness of that strategy when they can instead derive dual benefits from permanent outpost displays of titles. First they get incremental sales through impulse (a trade group will study how to best measure this during the last quarter of 1999), and second they catalyze sales of related products, enhancing total-store performance.

Magazines help raise consumer involvement in each category, making purchases likelier and upsells easier. Category management expert Robert Blattberg often tells of the benefits for stores when they raise shoppers from a point of indifference to evoking an emotional response from merchandise displays.

The 5,000-square-foot Nature's Marketplace boutiques at Wegmans Food Markets, Rochester, N.Y., exemplify this approach. The chain has invested a great deal in 20,000 stockkeeping units that it tailors by store, integrating general merchandise with organic produce, dairy and frozen foods, and health and beauty care, including supplements, vitamins, homeopathic and herbal remedies.

It obviously appeals to health enthusiasts, and Wegmans has leveraged that interest with a highly visible publication test this spring and summer. One of the chain's circulars each month included bits of health news for consumers, related to the Rodale Press Prevention issue coming out during that time period. The direct tie-in was a first for Prevention, said Dick Terlaak Poot, national marketing director of single-copy sales at Emmaus, Pa.-based Rodale.

Speaking of the chain's interdisciplinary approach to Nature's Marketplace, Dave D'Arezzo, director of grocery/dairy/frozen/bulk foods at Wegmans, added that "consumers don't realize the work we do to break down silos and determine how to merchandise. As they walk through the department, they're just excited to see it."

Wegmans also tested two Conde Nast titles, Bon Appetit and Gourmet, by cross merchandising them on a four-tier, freestanding wire fixture in food aisles. Devised to help in solution selling and inspire impulse sales, a header sign above the rack read, "Wegmans and Conde Nast Recommend." Along with two facings of each magazine on the top tier were recipe cards in the center pocket, endorsed by the Wegmans nutritionist.

The bottom racks hold some ingredients contained in the recipe, and, noted Steven Safran, the publisher's national marketing manager, "we had the option of bringing in a participating advertiser, who could be mentioned in the recipe and featured in the rack's bottom bin."

A similar effort at Genuardi's Family Markets, Norristown, Pa., has racked up eight to 10 times the normal sales volume of Bon Appetit and Gourmet over the past year, plus the chain receives a retail display allowance for cross merchandising the publications, said John Stahl, the chain's director of nonfood.

Indeed, RDAs play a major role in magazine profitability at supermarkets. RDAs from checklane displays account for 6.5% of category profit, and in the mainline area they jump to 9.7%, said Mike Kessler, chief executive officer at Central Sales & Marketing, publishing sales and marketing consultants based in Fair Lawn, N.J.

Speaking at a recent New York-based Periodical and Book Association of America convention, he noted other money pools that supermarkets could tap: initial placement, specific checklane position and fixturing incentives. The type of allowance Genuardi's receives is an emerging profit center for chains.

Yet what appears to be more critical for the long-term success at supermarkets is retailers' improved understanding of the reading consumers, satisfying their eclectic tastes and knowing the hot buttons to press in secondary displays.

Giant Food, Landover, Md., for instance, uses Prevention magazine to leverage product sales in its stores and convey to customers that the chain cares about their health. That's clearly synergistic with Giant's pharmacies ranking among the most productive in the trade class, and drawing heavy traffic through health and beauty care aisles.

Moreover, added Terlaak Poot, "It makes sense to target your customer with solution selling programs. If a person is going into the vitamin section looking for herbs and ways to self-medicate, what's better than to have a trusted source of information right there at the same level in the same department?"

The Giant effort goes even broader than that: cross merchandising magazines within produce, pharmacy, pet care, meats, bakery and elsewhere in its stores, appealing to many sides of consumers to build sales. Publications inform, entertain and inspire trial of different products people may not have used before.

The key to what Giant and others are doing, observed one consultant, is that these off-shelf locations for magazines are permanent rather than in-and-out. Some are single title, others are multiple. But they get refreshed and people learn to look for them in these places.

"Magazines are analogous to batteries," noted Ellen Gussin, president of Northfield, Ill.-based Allen Levis Organization, a consultancy. "It's the best category I can think of for secondary displays. Titles add value to whatever a store is selling in that department. They mean something different to every part of the store, they're always made new again in a month, and they're one of the strongest cross-merchandising opportunities for the supermarket.

"The synergies are good for everybody," she added. "It's the publisher's challenge to make point-of-purchase signage very explicit to consumers." Done well, these high-impulse outposts sell titles and related products, increasingly with cents-off coupons in the issues tied to advertised products that are also on display.

However commendable these efforts, some industry watchers take a harsher view of the practice. "They certainly have potential to grow categories, but there's absolutely no proof that you're not just moving the sale around [from mainline or checkout]," said John Harrington, principal in Harrington Associates, a Norwalk, Conn.-based consultancy. "The benefit is more magazine sales, it certainly creates an image that the store is being marketed more effectively, and it seems to make sense to customers. But any gains are hard to demonstrate. When a magazine is scanned, you don't know if it came from the checkout, mainline or secondary displays."

Again the issue of incomplete Universal Product Code data rears its head, demonstrating that performance of secondary displays can't be measured with certainty unless manual detailing is done frequently -- and that's costly.

To determine the true benefits of secondary displays to supermarkets, the Magazine Retail Advisory Council, facilitated by Gussin's team, will undertake tests this fall and winter with a national wholesale distributor and some of its trading partners.

Even before the tests are undertaken, she said she believes what she sees, that "off-shelf is driving significant sales, and the clean floor policy at chains shouldn't interfere with these efforts. Of course the challenge is to know where sales come from. We'll report on our test results in February at the Magazine Publishers of America conference."

Another challenge to the success of secondary displays, said Michael Pashby, executive vice president for consumer marketing at MPA, New York, is "the matter of cooperation within store management. The general-merchandise person doesn't control floor space in food areas. It's a matter of persuading people to cooperate and give up some space for the benefit of the store. People are jealous and rightly so. But with cooperation comes enormous opportunity."

Two more examples where this approach is working are Kroger Co. stores near Roanoke, Va., where Prevention is displayed in the produce department, and Marsh Supermarkets, Indianapolis, where four to six different titles are consistently displayed within produce, but a visible sales lift is generated by such magazines as Cigar Afficionado and Wine Spectator in the smoke shops and wine departments.

"You want to make sure you stock products that are mentioned in the publication," said Bill Mansfield, vice president of general merchandise. "If you put Wine Spectator out there and you don't stock any of the wines they rate, you could be sending your customers to your competition."