THAI MAGAZINE DISTRIBUTION IN ACTION
Here is a picture showing one kerbside magazine distribution business in Thailand in action.
When you look at this you can see why it's pretty near impossible for any kind of circulation auditing to happen. Imagine asking these guys to keep track of delivery and returns notes.
For most publishers the distribution process works - albeit not as smoothly as most would like.
4 comments:
interesting note! :) i wonder what is the audit process like.
Does this come as any surprise?
Thailand's publishing industry suffers badly at the hands of both the distribution process and the in-store merchandising. To battle the possible drift to online stores and distributors need to take their service up a notch if they still wish to make money from publishers and customers alike.
Not really sure if that's ready to happen though.
I'm curious...From your observations, what do you think is driving the lackadaisical attitude to distribution? It seems that all areas of the process could stand to see improvement, and yet there doesn't seem to be any impetus to change.
My view is that because the distribution (and merchandising) systems are 'working', there's no real desire for a change. Plus there is a lot of politics involved in the distribution change. If you want your magazine to appear in one shop you must use one company, and another for another. There isn't one distributor you can deal with that will put your magazines in every outlet.
Distribution, circulation and auditing are linked, in my opinion. The whole system needs to change for everything to work in synergy.
Can it be right that a publisher must wait up to four months to know how many copies of a particular issue was sold (and even longer for payment in some cases)?
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