It is a common gesture for many French people: pick up the mail from the mailbox, put aside all the brochures and throw a large part of them directly into the trash. But are these paper flyers living out their last hours? Cora finished its distribution last January and the brand will be followed by E.Leclerc stores next September. Carrefour, for its part, has promised 80% of digital brochures by 2024, while Intermarché wants to halve its number for the same horizon.
If the posters extol their ecological merits, we must also see the shadow of the production cost of these brochures, with the price of paper that has skyrocketed in recent years. Because its weight is not unimportant: 766,000 tons of unaddressed advertising material were still delivered to mailboxes in 2021, or 25 kilograms per household. So far, large retailers have only tentatively tested certain catchment areas, fearing detrimental business consequences on their turnover.
Because previous attempts have been inconclusive. In 2010, E.Leclerc had announced to great fanfare that its paper brochures would disappear in ten years: faced with the reduction in the average basket of its supermarkets, the brand had discreetly buried its frustrated ambitions and revised its strategy. This is also one of the reasons that push System U to be cautious. At its head, Dominique Schelcher affirmed assuming “perhaps to be the last to still offer a prospectus” in the mailboxes, wanting to “leave free choice to the consumer”.
A “heavyweight” of communication
All these big announcements are the trees that hide the forest: the prospectus is far from having said its last word. If the market has fallen by 25% in ten years, it is still “a heavyweight” in promotional communication, explains Xavier Guillon, director of the research company France Pub. It is more a rationalization than a disappearance. Distributors are increasingly optimizing their prospectuses, to better target local customers and limit the cost of paper on the go. Less paging, and therefore fewer volumes.
Not least because consumers are still attached to their free catalogs they find in their mailboxes: the iconic Stop Pub sticker has only been relatively successful in the end, with a placement rate no higher than 20% today. In big cities, where local shops are scattered around the surrounding streets, there is no need for flyers to compare brands -which explains how easy it was for Monoprix to withdraw them- unlike in rural and peri-urban areas, where the car is still necessary.
In order not to miss it, supermarkets have taken their precautions. To compensate for the scarcity of their brochures, or even their complete disappearance, supermarkets are betting on digital formats. Social networks, newsletters and, above all, own applications where you can consult your promotional catalogs – “Lidl Plus” has climbed to sixth place among the most downloaded applications in France. But this digitization requires an educational effort with customers. “Once everyone has changed, the pedagogy will be ready,” Michel-Édouard Leclerc wants to believe.
Milee (formerly Adrexo), which shares the brochure distribution market with Mediapost, is betting on its new project, the launch of a magazine dedicated to brochures. Called “150 euros”, this free weekly magazine will combine information on consumption and the catalogs of local stores. But, to receive it, you will have to register, unlike the traditional brochure. “We needed to find alternative solutions” given the decrease in brochures, specifies Pierre-Yves Larvor, who aims for 12 million subscribers by the end of the year.
Destockers and specialized brands
If Milee’s bet wins, it could improve the image of the mailbox – today half of subscribers prefer the paper version of the magazine to its digital version. Until then appreciated by the beauty or household linen sector, the directed catalog, that is to say the one for which the client has subscribed, could well be favored by the brands (Leclerc thinks, in particular). The flyer mutates, but does not die. All the more so that, beyond the big food brands, all the specialized brands and destockers have not given up on it.
Source: BFM TV
