Abstract:

One of the marketing problems in the Italian publishing industry concerns control of distribution. Most publications, in fact, are distributed by organizations that are not dependent on the publisher, and control at point of sale is not as timely, complete and accurate as would be desirable. To solve this problem publishers may : a) request sales data from the distribution organizations, carry out controls at samples of newsstands through their own personnel. As far as we know, both methods are used. But we do not know if a systematic and continuous survey has ever been carried out on a sample of newsstands covering all publications. A survey of this type poses complex organizational and methodological problems. In order to clarify the problems, we present the results of a pilot survey conducted on a sample of 16 newsstands . The fieldwork was done in November, 1971 and covered a period of two weeks.