Food fight: can a venerable foodservice trade title resolve its identity crisis with a redesign inspired by the consumer camp?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Dec 1, 1991 by Catherine Fredman

What happens when a trade magazine attempts to stand out from the competition by imitating its consumer counterparts? Penton Publishing is about to find out with its muchheralded redesign of Restaurant Hospitality (RH).

"We knew we'd never be number one in ad pages or share of market because of our lower frequency so our goal was to be number one in the minds of our readers-to build the relationship that would distinguish us from our competitors," says RH's national sales manager David Brodowski. Wally Patterson of Patterson Advertising Reports and the former publisher of Restaurant Hospitality, notes that if you had torn the covers off, you'd have had an awful tough time distinguishing" the old Restaurant Hospitality from rival trade title Restautrant Business (RB).

Consequently, with the September issue, the food-service trade magazine went from a standard size to a larger 9-by-12-inch format, sported a zippy new logo, improved its paper stock and boasted shorter, snappier-looking-articles-in short, RH seems determined to bridge the gap between food-service trade magazines and consumer food magazines.

As the oldest (75 years) of the food-service trades, the 139,000 controlled circulation monthly Restaurant Hospitality is a consistent runner-up in national ad pages and revenue dollars to Restaurants & Institutions (R&I) and Restaurant Business (RB). Restaurants & Insititutions, with 27 issues a year and a controlled circulation of 142,000. serves the total market; says editor Jane Wallace, We serve all areas of food service where food is served away from home." Restaurant Business, which publishes every three weeks and has an unpaid circulation of 130,000, is aimed at decision makers in high-volume, popularly priced restaurants, i.e., chains. Restaurant Hospitality is targeted to the middle ground of family-owned and independent operations.

On the road to redesign

Starting in 1989, Restaurant Hospitality, embarked on an ambitious market-research program. It conducted focus groups, personal interviews and surveys to find out the industry's opinion of service magazines and related consumer titles.

"One of the biggest things the restaurateurs told us," says editor Michael DeLuca, "was that they couldn't tell the magazines apart except for the tabloid-size newsweekly Nation's Restaurant News. They found very little difference in what the magazines covered and how we covered it. " Adds Brodowski, "We had forgotten who the readers were. Presentation is part of what they buy just as it's part of what they sell-it follows that a magazine must be visually appealing for them to get into it. "

DeLuca admits, however, that the subsequent proposal to redesign was a tough sell to Penton. "But we had the research to back it up." Rather than hire a design consultant to work on the new format, the in-house art director was tapped, says DeLuca, because she knew the readers, the business environment and Penton's internal capabilities. In order to upsize, the magazine had to leave the company-owned printer. That was a difficult decision, he recalls. "It was not going to cost a lot more, but when you take money out of the corporate coffers there's always concern." The installation of a Mac-based computer system also met with resistance. But DeLuca saya he's already seen a a back in positive response from readers.

But as it sidles toward the consumer camp, Restaurant Hospitality may find its targeted niche already occupied by two recent additions to the field: three-year-old 50,000-circulation Food Arts, which publishes 10 issues a year, and Spice, a 35,000-circ quarterly, which published its second issue this fall.

"Spice was frankly a surprise to me," DeLuca admits. But it tells me that we're both on the right track." Michael Batterberry, co-founder and associate publisher of Food Arts, says his title is aimed at the higher-end market. The main difference between Food Arts and Spice, says Spice associate publisher jeff Williams, is that "we are very much a product-oriented magazine. Food Arts tends to have more of a people approach."

The niche that Food Arts occupies and Restaurant Hospitality hopes to exploit is a relatively new one catering to independent, fine-dining operations-a product of the burgeoning interest in and spending on food in America in the 1980s and the money to sustain that interest. And it's a profitable one; Food Arts is the only food-service magazine that has shown a marked increase in advertising pages since the 1987 stock market crash: from 90 pages in 1989 to 261 in 1990.

Scrambling for ads

But times aren't easy for food-service magazines these days. "There's been a significant decrease in the number of advertising pages in the field" caused by the recession, says Restaurants & Institutions Wallace.

The recession isn't the only bedeviling factor. Mergers of the past decade also affected the industry, consolidating a plethora of individual advertisers into group buys by mega-companies like Kraft and General Foods, Beatrice, and RJR Nabisco. Lastly, says Patterson, "The biggest problem is growth in the food-service industry has slowed down because growth of the chains has slowed. After all," he says, citing the dollar volume for a McDonald's franchise, "how many $2 million operations can you create in a marketplace?"