What’s in a newspaper shopper’s basket

Daily Mail readers plan what they are doing for today, tomorrow, next week and next month. The Sun readers tend to live for now and base their buying decisions on what they need now. This is the point that my customer, a senior project manager for a major national retailer made.

I have been investigating the value of newspapers in our store. Apart from the traditional CTN products we stock a convenience offer from Bread to Beer and Milk to Marmalade so our customers have a reasonable choice of products. Using the data from our EPoS system I have been looking at what Sun customers buy with their newspaper.

The first thing that jumped out of the report is that for the past three months the Sun has never been purchased by itself; customers have always bought other things. This clearly increases the value of the title beyond the 6.6p gross profit we make from the sale. A check through the three months of sales revealed that the average Sun buyer spent around £4.00, choosing from 750 different products. So it’s not just the Sun and a packet of fags or a bag of crisps.

As a comparison I looked at the Daily Mail for the same period and found that a third of these customers only bought the newspaper and nothing else. Of the other two thirds there were 790 different products purchased, but the average spend for a Daily Mail customer has been only £1.81.

The lottery is the top associated sale with both newspapers and, as one would expect, the every day essentials of daily life make up most of the top 20 for both titles. Sun readers smoke and Mail readers don’t.

So on this research a Sun buyer seems more our sort of customer than a Daily Mail buyer. Next I must look at the Daily Telelegraph, our most profitable newspaper.