How publishing models will change

27 June 2009

A good marketer makes business seem simple, but it’s a rare talent.

The right way to do business does not often coincide with how a publishing company is run. Intelligent people make mistakes just as thick people do, only bigger because more people believe in them.

A good marketer is a good businessperson. A good businessperson must be a good marketer. Marketing is no longer low key, but has a much wider remit across the whole of publishing. Marketers now have a leading strategic role rather than one of direct contact with suppliers and readers.

“Marketing is too important to be left to a single department. Company growth is an issue for the publishing company as a whole.”

So how do you define a successful businessperson? Firstly, they don’t do it for money. Money is what you get out of an ATM to spend in a shop. Good marketers work towards influencing and controlling markets – and make £10m, £20m or £30m in the process. The millions they make are are simply the measure of their control of that market.

Isn’t marketing simple? Is it important?
They look like an easy couple of questions but many editors and publishers get the answers wrong.

In fact, there is nothing as easy, yet harder for them to understand.

Of all the three major publishing disciplines, marketing, editorial and advertising, marketing comes first because unless you have a market, you don’t have a product to edit or to sell advertising in. But marketing can be difficult and that is why many big publishers grow by buying up smaller ones: there is no marketing involved.

Today’s changing marketing models
Integrated marketing – combining digital and print – is now universally accepted as the default model of today and the future. The only other model that will work is Online, cutting out the print version.

Glossy magazines will take forever to find a suitable Online business model, and will slowly shrink as they struggle. The rest of the publishing world will change to their new model over the next five years.

Online business, like subscriptions marketing, is a branch of direct marketing; the techniques have simply been digitalised. Nothing else has changed. If you, or your boss, are not grounded in direct marketing methodology, then you will not survive over the next five years. Sorry.

Either get an education (that means some good training), move industries or delegate the whole marketing process to an expert you can trust. That ‘expert’ can’t be a junior exec you need to check on every week. The D.M. expert is someone you are delegating upwards to – not downwards. He, or she, will sit on your board of directors – and will shape your future.

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