magazine subscriptions

Hearst magazines has run a One Day Sale, offering a bunch of magazines for US $5 for a year-long subscription.  This is an amazing deal for titles like: Cosmopolitan (6 issues), Country Living, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s BAZAAR, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, O, The Oprah Magazine (6 issues), Seventeen, SmartMoney and Town & Country.  Hearst has done this before so it must work.

This amazing discount by Hearst is odd because their chief marketing officer is on the record as saying that their products are undervalued.

“We’re realizing that the product is undervalued,” said Michael A. Clinton, the chief marketing officer of Hearst Magazines, which raised cover prices on more than half of its magazines last year and plans to raise subscription prices this year.

While magazine subscription deals here in Australia frustrate me from time to time, I am glad they are not as desperate as what Hearst runs in the US.

As a reward for buying a DVD from Amazon.com last week, I received an email from the company saying I qualify for three amazing magazine subscription deals:

Thanks to your recent DVD order, you now qualify for a $1 subscription to Rolling Stone (1-year), Men’s Journal (1-year) or Us Weekly (2-month). You can purchase individually or combine for $1 each, up to three total.

The consumer in me loves an offer like this. If I was a US resident why would I not take up at least one of the deals? I am a fan of Rolling Stone magazine and to get this delivered for a year for $1 would be excellent.

The retailer in me cringes when I read about the deal as I know there must be plenty around like this – co-promotions with other products. While we see few of these in newsagencies I have seen them in fitness centres, fashion businesses and sports clubs.

Every heavily discounted magazine subscription sold outside the retail channel is another reason for a shopper to not visit a newsagency or other magazine outlet and this challenges the health of the category.

I understand the need for publishers to balance sales between retail, subscription deep-discount subscription and other channels. It is the retail channel which billboards mastheads and helps titles find new readers. While a deal like the one from Amazon which I received last week may generate subscriptions, I suspect that someone discovering Rolling Stone in my newsagency will engage more deeply with the title than someone who picked it up for 8.3 cents a copy.

I was disappointed to read a report in Brand Republic four days ago claiming that some UK publishers are offering steep discounts to counter a slide in retail sales.

To any Australian publishers contemplating such a move I would suggest active engagement with the newsagency channel. I am certain that better terms for newsagents where they get a customer to commit to a subscription of six or twelve months wold result in good sales growth.

Newsagents play an important role in promoting magazines. Subscriptions sales are often only achieved thanks to the promotional effort of newsagents. To cut them out of the subscription loop is unfair and is another reason can newsagents feel shafted by publishers.

My bone today is with the Australian magazine subscription system. In short, it sux. While Eva Mendes is smouldering away on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar in my newsagent, she is nowhere within the vicinity of my mailbox… and I refuse to buy her in duplicate on account of waste. Last month, my Harper’s Bazaar was about two weeks late. Hence why I refused to post anything about it. Poo to you, tardy one.

That is Erica Bartle writing at her Girl With a Satchel blog yesterday.

A smart publisher would work with newsagents on a subscription model which rewards the consumer for loyalty and rewards the newsagent for selling a subscription as well as providing the collection service.

The newsagent / publisher technology exists today.  All that is mising is the will from the publisher side to make this happen.

As Erica shows in her blog post, consumers continue to shop at newsagencies regardless of having a subscription.  Leverage that and create a welcome win win.
It is easier to manage dtstributuoin ot a retail network than it is to tens of thousands of individual homes.  A good technology link can ensure that the publisher, consumer and newsagent are all communicated with professionally, consistently and with satisfaction.