How our jobs have changed

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 1998 by Barbara Love

Efrem Zimbalist III, president and CEO of Times Mirror Magazines, agrees. "Consumer marketers have a better feeling of what's going on with the magazine than anyone except maybe the publisher," he said at a recent Fulfillment Management Association meeting. "They have the whole picture and they have to be damn smart. I see no reason why a consumer marketer could not be the head of the company."

While the new title of consumer marketer officially thrusts circulators into the brand extension fray (at least as marketers), the editor's role in brand extensions is not so clear. Involvement is often a choice. And many have chosen not to get involved.

"We tell everyone in our company, `You are a business builder,'" says Jim deGraffenreid, president of Hart Publications. "You contact the customer or you help build the product--if you think broadly. I find the editors the most reluctant to buy into that. They don't want to say, `I'm a business builder.' Some do, but for the most part they simply say, `I want to be a journalist.' I think that's an area in our business where we need to change.

"There's often the complaint that all publishers come from the marketing side," he adds. " `You betcha,' I say. The reason is that editors haven't wanted to get involved."

Whether or not editors are interested in entering the management ranks, Toni Apgar, a vice president and group publishing director at Cowles Enthusiast Media, who came up through editorial, points out that getting involved in brand extension is good "job security" in today's changing environment.

Cost-cutting moves beyond the traditional

Overall there seems to be more emphasis on growth than cost-cutting, but the lean and mean thinking that blew through publishing companies five to 10 years ago is still with us. Companies, for the most part, have not gone back to the old (pre-downsizing) ways of doing business. Cahners' Rice says, "The credo here is still, `Make sure you create as big an impact as possible with minimum staff or budget.'"

"We have already done what we could to cut costs with our traditional processes," says Kemp. "Managers were engaged in belt-tightening changes in the early nineties when they experienced an assault on their profit margins. For many publishers, the principle focus was on cost reduction in traditional operations--reducing magazine frequency, cutting the ad:edit ratio, choosing lighter paper stock, reducing trim size, sending out fewer promotions, and controlling T&E.

"That kind of cost-cutting has its limitations," notes Kemp. "If we are going to compete on price of products, we have to re-engineer the way we do business. We still have to invest in things that create value for our customers--readers and advertisers--but we can rethink our infrastructure and overhead." For one thing, Kemp is talking to colleagues about the benefits of a "virtual company."

Management and department heads are looking for non-traditional cost-cutting approaches. In many ways, technology is leading them.