Analyzing covers that sell; if you are looking only at gross volume numbers, you may be missing the boat

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov, 1989 by Ron Scott

Analyzing covers that sell How do you know if your magazine has been a winner on the newsstand during any given month? You probably look at the hard sales numbers and say, "We're up 20,000 copies over the last issue, we did well." Or, "We were down 5,000 compared to a year ago."

But is that enough analysis? Is it enough to know what was best and or worst about the competition? Did you make your magazine the best that month or did your competitors make you the best through abdication of the marketplace? Or did you miss the market and let your competitors dominate?

I did a market analysis of four magazine groups: women's service, newsweeklies, women's fashion and computing. Although a single issue of any one of the titles within each market may have met its goals, far too often that title's market share was eroded by the strength of its competitors. for example, during the week of October 20, 1987, both Time and Newsweek met their single-copy goals--however, U.S. News & World Report doubled its single-copy unit sale and increased its market share by 7.8 percent.

But why should we use single-copy sales as the benchmark for success? Why not total circulation, or advertising page totals? Because total circulation and ad page numbers give you the overall response to your magazine. They do not give you an individual, issue-by-issue response. When we analyze single-copy circulation, however, we learn, in the only way possible, about direct reader response to specific issues of our magazine.

And the newsstand is the only place where we compete directly with our competitors. In almost all the cases presented here, all the competitors are available to the reader on the same display fixture at the same time.

The single-copy market is an impulse market. It takes the average consumer five seconds to decide whether or not to buy your magazine, according to a study by The New York Times Magazine Group. That is the amount of time a reader takes to size up a total editorial package. Most, if not all, of that time is devoted to the cover subject and the cover lines. Some 60 percent of the readers who buy magazines on the newsstands have no plans to purchase a magazine when they enter a store, according to another study done by Redbook.

A cover, then, has to work had and fast to capture the attention and dollars of the potential reader.

Adolph Auerbacher, senior vice president and publishing director, Meredith Corp., has an informal test for cover design. He calls it the foot test. He drops the cover on the floor at his feet. Are the cover lines legible? Is the graphic easy to understand? If the answer to these two questions is "yes," then the issue has a chance on the newsstand. He also stresses that the cover has to keep on selling after a person has taken the magazine home. We want the buyer to keep picking the magazine up, not just leave it sitting on the coffee table. Otherwise that reader may not be interested in buying again.

John Mack Carter, editor in chief at Good Housekeeping, says it this way: "One of the reasons why we are on the newsstands is to make our audience younger. It brings young people to the marketplace. It introduces our magazines to people who don't know about it through subscriptions." Survey's indicate that single-copy buyers are 10 years younger than subscribers.

Competition is both a stimulus and a frustration. None of the fashion magazines were delighted when Elle entered the American market. Yet all magazines in the category became sharper because of the new challenge. Consequently, the field started attracting more single-copy buyers. In 1985, the year before Elle became a force in the fashion field, the total single-copy circulation market for Vogue, Glamour and Harper's Bazaar was 2.456 million, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). Elle has an average newsstand circulation of 503,000 copies, yet the total market addressed in this article for the four titles has swelled to 3.22l million. The field has benefited, no doubt.

But before we launch into this anlysis, let's look at how typical consumer products companies track their performance as compared to their competitors.

Normally we think of market share as the overall pie sliced according to component products. The pie is split up depending on which title is leading in ad pages, or circulation totals, etc.

This traditional pie graphic, which many consumer groups use to illustrate market share, is adequate for consumer products that remain essentially unchanged for long periods of time, but not for magazines. The packaging and contents of Campbellhs Tomato Soup or Wonder Bread will stay the same for several years, which is why the pie is an adequate measurement for the consumer goods market.

Magazine publishers have a more challenging task. We change the packaging and the contents with every issue. We must signal the reader that we are the same, but different with every issue. This makes magazines more dynamic than any other consumer product. We know from single-copy research by various publishers that our target reader does not buy every issue we create. A composite of that research indicates that our reader buys some four issues fof every 12 we publish.