Are you selling your magazine like a cheap airline ticket?


Monthly consumer magazine sales are dropping 10% or more each year. The big publishers respond by increasing cover prices by around 5% year on year. But it’s not working. Overall income continues to drop. Meanwhile newstrade wastage increases.

Falling sales is a problem for the marketers to solve. Unfortunately, their moves are sabotaged by bosses who ignore basic marketing principles.

Those who decide marketing strategy have been selling off their magazine subscriptions in cheap price-led promotions, just like airline tickets.

Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, Esquire, Harpers Bazaar, Zest and She are discounting up to 70%. The average discount for National Magazines (Nat Mags) for example, is 54%.

And this discounting has been going on during the longest consumer boom since the second world war. Now that boom has ended, publishers have no fall-back position.

There is nothing new in cutting your price.

When you sell your magazine on price, it’s the price your reader will focus on, not the benefits your publication brings. So when money is tight, guess what gets the chop?

Surveys always show that people are happy to order a magazine if they are told about it. A subscription promotion is a great way to catch those who (like most) don’t often browse in a newsagent.

Where are all the subscription promotions?
So where are all the subscription promotions telling people about the magazines they could be reading, selling the benefits?There aren’t any. It’s as though the magazine bosses are ashamed of what they are offering and just can’t bring themselves to ask for the proper amount of money. You see plenty of offers for cheap or free subscriptions, but rarely do they mention much about the magazine’s content.

That’s not marketing – it’s selling stuff off cheap and any fool can do that.

Magazines are not airline tickets
Discounting may work for airline tickets, but magazines are different. You demean your product by cutting the price simply to put it in the hands of a prospect. Unless you give a very good reason for offering money off, your magazine will always be viewed as something cheap and short-term.

Publishing should have a profitable back end. We surely want long-term, committed readers we can sell other things to.

Specialist and B2B publishers – the real marketers
In issue 68 of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter we look at B2B and specialist titles. They take a very different approach to marketing and those are the areas where all the money is being made.

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