Why sell your magazine cheap? Do
you sell subscriptions like airline tickets? Marketing in a recession; Why big
publishers are losing sales; Where are all those consumer magazine websites? The
real marketers: B2B and specialist publishers; Case studies: Practical
Fishkeeping; Grazia: Cosmopolitan; Economist; Aquarium Fish magazine
Dear
Colleague,
Are you selling your magazines like airline
tickets?
Monthly consumer magazine sales are dropping
10% or more each year. The big publishers respond by increasing cover prices by
around 5% year on year. But it’s not working. Overall income continues to drop.
Meanwhile newstrade wastage increases.
Falling sales is a problem for the marketers
to solve. Unfortunately, their moves are sabotaged by bosses who ignore basic
marketing principles.
Surveys always show that people are happy to
order a magazine if they are told about it. A subscription promotion is a great
way to catch those who (like most) don’t often browse in a newsagent. So where
are all the subscription promotions telling people about the magazines they
could be reading?
There aren’t any. It’s as though the magazine
bosses are ashamed of what they are offering and just can’t bring themselves to
ask for the proper amount of money. You see plenty of offers for cheap or free
subscriptions, but rarely do they mention much about the magazine’s content.
That’s not marketing – it’s selling stuff off
cheap and any fool can do that.
Discounting may work for airline tickets, but
magazines are different. You demean your product by cutting the price simply to
put it in the hands of a prospect. Unless you give a very good reason for
offering money off, your magazine will always be viewed as something cheap and
short-term.
Publishing should have a profitable back end.
We surely want long-term, committed readers we can sell other things to.
Here are
some average subscription discounts as a percent of full retail cover price:
Conde Nast: 35%; National Magazines: 54%; Time Warner: 83%; Emap: 26%; BBC
Worldwide: 24%; Future: 42% and IPC: 20%.
Peter
Hobday
Members-only section Subscriptions Strategy issue 68 >>>