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Do you coach your shoppers

"Rather than just telling people we have a store full of products, we are selling the idea that hobbies are an enjoyable low-cost way of occupying leisure time", says Chris Crombie, chief executive of HobbyCraft, which supplies knitting and model-making supplies. Newspaper retailers have a sense that they need to do this, as do their suppliers. One of the newspaper industry's problems is too many potential readers focus on what they can get elsewhere for free and too few focus on the value that papers deliver. Shoppers need to be educated and when they are, mostly they like it. Waitrose and John Lewis put educating shoppers at the heart of how they differentiate their offer and it works for them. If they can, newspaper retailers can.
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