Electrifying comeback: in changing owners, Electronic Design lost its way, but market promotion put it back on track

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Oct 1, 1991 by Warren Berger

In changing owners, Electronic Design lost its way, but market promotion put it back on track.

When Paul Mazzacano took over as publisher of Electronic Design (ED) three years ago, circuits started popping all around him. Though the 36-year-old magazine for designers of electronics equipment had been the leader in its field in the mid-to-late 1980s, its position began to slip following the venerable title's sale to a foreign owner.

Electronic Design's 190,000 circulation was bloated and its positioning and identity with advertisers weak. The Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey-based title, published 24 times a year, was losing share (it fell below 10 percent) in the hyper-competitive electronics-engineering publishing market. And its still-new owner, the Dutch publishing giant VNU, was getting antsy.

Within a year of his being wooed away from McGraw-Hill, where he was national sales manager at Electronics magazine, to VNU's competing publication, the 50-year-old Mazzacano found himself heading a magazine that was back on the auction block. It didn't look good," he says. "VNU had just bought the title [from Hayden Publishing in 19871 and now it was turning around and trying to unload it. That doesn't help you when you're going out there trying convince advertisers to come back."

Adding to Mazzacano's problems were an inexperienced sales staff (VNU had cleaned house in the sales department after acquiring the title). And he was having trouble getting advertisers to accept Electronic Design's newly split foreign and domestic editions-prior to VNU, the title had had one global edition. "To put it bluntly, the magazine had been totally mismanaged," Mazzacano says. Media buyer Sheila Schaffer of the ad agency Tallant LaPointe, which handles some of the Hewlett-Packard products, shares that view: "Under VNU, the magazine lacked merchandising, promotion-and a sense of direction," Schaffer says.

But Electronic Design would prove to be second-time lucky when it came to changing owners. Cleveland-based Penton, which bought the title in the summer of 1989 (for an undisclosed sum), decided to let Mazzacano and his own management team take a crack at straightening out the magazine themselves, with minimal interference. And Mazzacano believed he knew just what to do to distinguish the magazine from its host of direct competitors - namely, EDN, EE Product News, Electronic Component News, Electronic Engineering Times, Electronic News, Electronic Products, Electronic Buyers News and Computer Design.

He embarked on a one-year turnaround strategy that encompassed sweeping changes in circulation, marketing and sales-meanwhile, editorial, which had never gone far astray, was simply fine-tuned by editor in chief Stephen Scrupski. By the end of the first year, advertising was already coming back (pages increased by about 10 percent last year, according to Stephen Livers, president of Space Analysis Systems, Inc.) and the magazine saw its market share increase by a full percentage point. And in 1991-a year in which the electronics-engineering category as a whole is suffering the ravages of the recession-Electronic Design's ad page totals are continuing their steady month-by-month climb. (Through the first seven months of this year, according to Space Analysis, pages are up about 8 percent and market share has jumped by 1.3 percent.) Overcoming biggest mistake' In wooing back advertisers, Mazzacano had to work with a relatively green sales staff. He believes VNU's decision to opt for a new, younger sales staff, presumably to lower costs and invigorate sales efforts, was "probably the biggest mistake VNU made." He adds, "We needed to provide a sense of stability to advertisers. So we set about training the people we had. It took time, but it's now paying off."

That sales staff was helped by the magazine's new promotional efforts that were designed to bolster Electronic Design's editorial identity. Mazzacano named a marketing manager for the magazine, Clifford Meth, who launched a monthly four-page newsletter for advertisers titled Inside Electronic Design," which explained upcoming stories in ED and discussed trends in the marketplace.

The magazine also began mailing a series of glossy promo pieces to advertisers, sometimes as often as every two weeks (the program benefited from Penton resources, which include in-house printing facilities). The promotional blitz hammered home a critical message: That Electronic Design differs from its direct competitors in the electronics-engineering field because of its strong emphasis on previewing cutting-edge technology.

"There's been a tendency in the past to confuse titles such as EDN [a leading competitor from Cahners] and Electronic Design," Meth says. While each of the magazines is different, he notes, the names sound alike and tend to blend together in non-readers minds. "We felt we had to educate media buyers on the distinctions," Meth says. The mailings have attempted to do that by highlighting examples of ED publishing information on new technology before any of its competitors.