Positioning for profit - clear editorial and marketing position is essential - column

Positioning for profit

I recently participated in a very worthwhile mergers and acquisitions conference in New York City, where for two days we discussed the envrionment for buying and selling magazines, and techniques for valuing magazine properties and negotiating their sale. I was particularly impressed with the amount of time devoted to and interest shown in a panel led by John Mack Carter, editor of Good Housekeeping, on the subject of market and product positioning as a key to successful acquisition strategies.

The positioning of the magazine you consider buying is one of the most critical questions you face. There must be a clear, unequivocal perception among its readers and in its market of the ground the magazine holds. What sets the magazine apart from others in the same field? What makes it unique? What does this magazine really stand for? What is the publication's niche?

John Mack Carter suggests, "Take an editor to lunch." To determine a magazine's niche, there's nothing like talking to the editor about who he thinks he writes for and how he carries out his mission. But in a very fast-paced, buy/sell environment, where the editor of the selling publication is not always available to the buyer, it also pays to look at the magazine's media kit and at the media kits of all the competitive publications, and to talk to space salesmen.

Without question, a proper valuation of a magazine property can only come after a really vigorous examination of both the editorial niche and the perception of the publication in the minds of advertising prospects. The strength of the magazine's position tells more about its potential and its fair market price than a history of earnings or computerized projections.

A failure to execute

While we were talking about positioning in a mergers and acquisitions context, I found myself thinking about the number of publishers--not interested in buying or selling at the moment--who simply do not give enough consideration to the matter of positioning. And I often find, in my own consulting work, that even when a publisher has carved out a solid editorial/market position--one that can be articulated in the publisher's SRDS statement and promotional literature--he often fails to execute that position on a consistent basis, to stay alert to changes that are taking place in a given market area, and to adapt to those changes.

I became interested in magazine positioning in the early 1970s when Al Ries and Jack Trout were telling us that positioning was essential to deal with the problem marketers face in an over-communicated society. There were just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise. Positioning, they said, cuts through chaos in the marketplace, making it easier for the customer to remember who you are and what you stand for.

Selling magazines to readers and ad space to advertisers is not exactly like selling cars or computers or toothpaste. But the need for the reader to have a clear perception about what he is buying and for the advertiser to understand what the magazine is delivering is central to growth and profitability, as well as vital to getting the best possible price when a publisher goes to sell his magazine.

There is even value to creating a position for a cluster of magazines; the Ziff-Davis Leisure Active Group did this with its network publications, and with its travel trade group. But each magazine within the group also stood on its own in terms of establishing and carving out a market position.

How travel titles did it

The travel industry is covered by a group of trade publications whose audience is primarily travel agents. There are approximately 30,000 such agencies in the United States, with more than 120,000 employees covering $54 billion in travel bookings. Travel is a very fast-moving field where news about rules and regulations in a deregulated environment, price changes and technology has always been important to the travel agent. More than 30 years ago, the leading publication in the field, both in paid circulation and ad revenue, Travel Weekly, positioned itself very simply as the national newspaper of the travel industry. Our objective at Ziff-Davis was to be there first with the news, to have the highest quality staff and the best interpretations. Through the years, Travel Weekly has been absolutely tireless in maintaining its position, moving to twice weekly without changing its name when developments dictated such a decision.

Because there were other weekly news publications in the marketplace also delivering travel agents and showing good readership, Travel Weekly took other measures to distinguish itself from the pack. We conducted market research, providing the industry with the first Louis Harris study of the dimensions of the market. By continuing to provide vital market data, Travel Weekly was able to promote the perception--and the reality--that its salespeople understood the market better than the competition did.

How did Travel Weekly's competitors also grow and prosper? The Travel Age publications, in the 1970s, created weekly magazine-format publications that were designed to provide the salespeople behind the counter--rather than the managers--with information about the travel market. CMP publications, just a couple of years ago, decided that the travel market should be divided into those people selling business travel and those selling leisure travel. They created two separate news-oriented publications (published on a twice-monthly frequency) that have had a special appeal and have grown rapidly. Still more recently, ASTA Travel News, the monthly news organ of the American Society of Travel Agents (now owned by Yankee Publishing), changed its name to ASTA Travel Management and its focus to much more in-depth material on the subject of management; it is a very clear position, moving the magazine away from others in the field, even though it is too early to tell whether this approach will succeed.

Recommend Publications, long a Florida destination medium, only recently decided to expand its editorial concept beyond the state of Florida into what they call Recommend Worldwide. Their view is that the busy travel agent selling pleasure travel needs to have a convenient way to access information about destinations, and that the news-oriented publications don't do as good a job in accomplishing this.

In the special interest consumer market, an interesting example of positioning was that of Modern Photography and Popular Photography. Both served the amateur photographer for many years. Both provided essentially the same mix of editorial. Popular Photography, by and large, had the larger circulation, the higher rates, and perhaps greater sophistication in servicing both the artistic and equipment oriented clusters within the audience.

But Modern Photography very deliberately gave the impression that its technical coverage was better than that of Popular Photography, even though both provided about the same number of pages of technical editorial. Modern Photography's subscription solicitations focused particularly on the technical side of its editorial mix, and the magazine worked to persuade advertisers that it appealed to the real nuts-and-bolts photographers more than Popular Photography did. Once again this was an illustration of not merely finding a position, but executing it consistently and vigorously in a way that was memorable.

Stating your intentions

Sometimes a magazine's positioning is really stated very well in a subhead or blurb on its cover. For example, the most important thing about the positioning of the new magazine Lear's is obviously not its name. Lear's doesn't say anything. Its subhead, however, is very clear: It's for "the woman who wasn't born yesterday"--the woman who is over 40 and really active. And the magazine's advertising and publicity really cements that notion. Everybody who sees Lear's these days understands what it is intended to be. The issue now is whether Lear's can carry off its editorial mission and whether its target audience is going to stay with it.

So whether you're at the beginning stages of development, like Lear's, or ready to buy or sell an established property, a clear sense of the magazine's positioning is a vital ingredient.

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