Extending The Brand: How To Best Leverage Strong Magazines

Circulation Management, Oct 1, 2003

To leverage a strong property and build profitable brand extensions is a publisher's dream. Consumer special-interest titles are perfectly positioned to increase circulation profitability and customer lifetime value through brand extensions. The opportunities for leveraging circulation and your reputation are enormous. But to do so, as everyone knows, is not easy. It's necessary to establish a strategy for building your brand potential that starts with the right company philosophy and structure.

At the recent Circulation Management Conference & Expo seminar on brand extensions for special interest magazines, Sarah Roman, Chief Marketing Officer, The Taunton Press, shared her knowledge on how to approach brand extensions and increase circulation profitability.

Connecticut-based Taunton Press is a 28-year-old privately-held company that publishes special-interest magazines, including Fine Homebuilding (circ 310,000), Fine Woodworking (circ 290,000), Fine Cooking (circ 240,000), Fine Gardening (circ 190,000) and Threads (circ 160,000).

Roman points out that special-interest magazines have a great deal of brand extension potential because they have focused, single-subject content; satisfy a particular need or desire among readers; enjoy an emotional connection with their audiences; and unlike many mass-market magazines, are NOT commodities.

Among the successful brand extensions Taunton launched in 2002 are The Best of Fine Woodworking CD-ROM, The Best of Fine Homebuilding CD-ROM, online archives for Fine Woodworking and Fine Homebuilding, Fine Gardening events, Threads Embroidery Collection online, and Fine Cooking's Holiday Baking annual. Taunton's book division publishes 50-plus books each year.

"All of these products came out of a desire to fulfill our customers' needs," says Roman. "We look at what the customer wants."

Roman's tips for leveraging a brand to achieve its full potential:

* DEVELOP A BRAND POSITIONING STATEMENT

While it may seem obvious that a brand positioning statement is needed, only a handful of attendees at the CM brand extension seminar said they had one. Roman likens a brand positioning statement to the more widely recognized Unique Selling Proposition (USP). However, the brand positioning statement is more than the USP. "It defines your target audience and it identifies the benefits that the brand brings to them," she says. "It is a statement that the circulation department, the publisher, the editor and the ad sales department agree on. It becomes the contract between marketers, editors and consumers."

The brand positioning statement provides differentiation and a distinct identity that is not represented by another brand, she points out. It helps insulate brands from competitive encroachment. It can make the difference between success and failure. It will really help you break through the clutter and provide a clear, focused and consistent message.

"If you don't have a brand positioning statement you really need to get circulation together with ad sales, editorial and management and get one," says Roman.

* INTEGRATE AND COORDINATE OPERATIONS

Before Taunton restructured its circulation and marketing organization, it was like most magazine companies, with circulation marketers, online marketers, partnership marketers and ad sales marketers all operating pretty independently from one another. "We've changed our whole attitude about marketing and circulation, putting the customer at the center of every effort, looking at our operations from their perspective."

Now everything is integrated. "You will probably be shocked," she told circulators. "We don't have a circulation department. We have a brand marketing department. We have a direct marketing organization, a trade sales organization and a new media group."

It's the brand marketer's responsibility to make sure all the messaging out there adheres to the brand positioning statement and that everything is integrated.

"We've adopted the marketing approach used by companies in the consumer packaged goods world, like Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola," says Roman. "It's all about understanding and fulfilling customer needs."

* THINK LONG-TERM

It's important to focus on long-term goals, allowing for short-term opportunities, says Roman. There are a lot of circulation strategies out there that are very short-term oriented, she says. Roman and the company have stayed away from "New York City tactics." Instead, they have chosen "moderate and deliberate growth to stay true to customers." The company has experienced growth every year with the philosophy of "making products for readers, not advertisers," she says. It doesn't always pay, for example, to do a one-year offer.

Conventional circulation wisdom says to keep the offer simple, and stay away from too many choices. Taunton's standard offer on insert cards was 1- 2- or 3-year options, with a bill me later or pay now option.

A number of years ago, a new employee decided to change the offers of Fine Homebuilding and Fine Gardening to one-year only, bill me later insert cards. Fine Homebuilding saw a 10 percent decline in net response, and by the third year was 25 percent behind in net orders and 17 percent behind in cumulative revenue because it lost the benefit of the multi-year business on the initial order, and created higher attrition rates for the coming years. Fine Gardening saw a similar response.