Is it just me or are magazines more popular than ever as the bonus gift with purchase. Check out the advertisement which appeared in The Sunday Age. Buy a phone and you get six or twelve issues of one of the magazines on show, delivered to your home. A pretty nice gift for a phone which is not all that expensive.
This is the second promotion I have seen in a week where a magazine subscription was the free gift with purchase. While I am no marketing expert I wonder if this devalues magazines in the eyes of consumers? I certainly tend to look on free gifts as not having as much value as the promoters would have us believe.
While I don’t like to see products I sell being given away so easily, I don’t begrudge magazine publishers participating in promotions like this. I just wish they wouldn’t do it.
Have you seen the competition running with the new Channel 7 show Winners and Losers?
Every person who enters the competition wins a 2 month subscription to New Idea (purchase of Swisse product is required to enter).
Another way of looking at it Mark is that magazines are so popular and ‘loved’ by readers that companies know that they will attract new business by offering them as a free gift. What’s more, you’d have to hope that someone who receives a subscription as a gift might engage with a magazine that they don’t currently purchase, and then continue with it after their gift subscription runs out.