Paper Plus rebrands and redirects
By Cath Winks,
Paper Plus has just cause for celebration – the wholly New Zealand-owned and operated group has gone from strength to strength over the last few years in a pretty tough market. How did it beat the odds?
It's thanks to a number of
things, but refocussing the Paper Plus brand with a greater emphasis on
books and the launch of a concept store in Sylvia Park are the major
reasons. Since then it has refined its direction and hunkered down with a more than $22 million refurbishment and brand redirection
plan for all its stores – just two years after an overhaul in October 2009 of the same cost. The refurbishment plans require buy-in from all
franchisees, but stores that have converted
are already reporting a significant uptake in sales.
Paper Plus has a new lease of life as a new ‘green brand’ and with the new look comes a shift to a greater focus on book selling as well as a streamlined and consistent store layout, new marketing campaign, advertising creative and point of sale.
Hyde has created the new look and creative and will soon launch its Christmas campaign – Paper Plus is forecasting growth of 14 percent in books this Christmas. The local book market is currently at $250 million while the stationery market sits at $1.23 billion.
November saw 34 stores upgraded and all 106 Paper Plus stores will be converted by the end of March next year, with 10 new stores in the pipeline.
There is also a new Paper Plus website and online store, new customer loyalty programme (over and above the existing Fly Buys) which has a database of around 160,000, and more book focussed events for customers coming up in conjunction with book ambassador Kerre Woodham.
Paper Plus recently won the Westpac Franchise System of the Year award, also taking out Best Retail Franchise System, Best Retail Franchisee and Media campaign of the year. And Nielsen data shows it is achieving significant growth in the book category. In a temperamental market where volume grew 1.4 percent but value declined 4.5 percent, Paper Plus has grown volume by 9.1 percent and value by 15.1 percent (YTD).
This story originally appeared on StopPress.
Comments
phratey
This “green” rubbish is getting out of hand. How can a company that relies on the continued felling of trees, indeed celebrates the increasing rate at which it is requiring it, claim to have turned green? Sell more books, great. Claim green? - get real! What naked spin!!!
Vincent Heeringa
So felling trees to create a countryside dominated by grass for feeding dairy cows is somehow better? Sustainably managed forests act as carbon sinks and will continue to do so, so long as you (or other people) buy paper.
Incentivise the planting of forests: buy paper.
phratey
@Vincent: what's dairying got to do with it? And get a grammar lesson, will you? Some people …
Vincent Heeringa
Eerk, you're right. Fixed the grammar and spelling, see above.
What I mean is that many people complain loudly about the felling of trees to create paper and yet in New Zealand we live off grasslands (for dairy, cattle, wool etc) that once were verdant primeval forests.
Those forests will remain stubbornly felled so long as grass is the source of cattle feed.
At least with the sustainable paper industry there's an incentive to plant trees and nurture forests.
That's the logic, albeit grammatically mangled last night. It was late, okay?
phratey
So we should replant all the grassland (that over 150 years has, nearly on its own in fact, enabled this country to innovate into a first world economy) and plant trees, so we can … what? … eat carbon-sunk sawdust while we read more books? Vincent, I may be a bit older than you because I can remember when the planting of large tracts of pinus radiata, especially in the central North Island, was as reviled by the chattering classes as, equally oddly, dairying seems to be today. Some people just do not seem to like economic activity as much as they like their iPhones and their lattes, and fail to see that the former provides the latter.
Derryn Brenan
Ah when we say green brand we all think environmental - but in actual fact Paper Plus are being more literal… their new logo and livery are, quite simply, green. as opposed to blue and yellow like they used to be. I don't think anyone at Paper Plus would claim to be the environmental leaders.
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