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Few fans of the magazine Gourmet expected the November issue of 2009 to be its last. However, a struggling economy, along with the internet, has made it hard for many magazines to survive.
After nearly 70 years, publisher Condé Nast abruptly stopped production of the monthly magazine due to lack of advertising sales and a shift in consumer interest. At the time of Condé Nast’s decision, both Gourmet and its sister magazine, Bon Appétit, were struggling with ad sales. Bon Appétit made the cut. Gourmet didn’t. Bon Appétit was offered as a substitute for Gourmet for the remainder of almost one million subscriptions.
Since then a slight margin (a slim 20 percent to be exact) of past Gourmet subscribers have chosen to switch to Bon Appétit. This seems odd for such highly dedicated and long-term subscribers. The lack of transferred subscriptions poses a hard question. Why did Condé Nast choose not to research the niche market of such an obviously successful magazine like Gourmet in order to keep those dedicated subscribers?
On the cover, the magazines look similar. Both share great recipes. Both feature articles about food, culture, and politics. However, the audiences of each magazine differ greatly. This is evidenced through both magazines advertisements as well as their contrasting takes on good living. Gourmet was luxurious and indulgent. It stressed extravagant travel and an elitist lifestyle. Bon Appétit stresses a comfortable home life, centering on family cooking. It offered complex, yet more accessible recipes.
While many Gourmet readers feel heartbroken about no longer receiving the magazine each month, Condé Nast’s decision makes good sense, especially when considering the economic forecast that sunk Gourmet. Foodies aren’t paying for exotic trips to experience food anymore. They’re cooking at home with their families, growing their own gardens, or buying local food. Despite a large fan base, Gourmet’s attention to life’s luxuries and hefty subscription fees failed to keep advertisers interested. In the case of Gourmet and many other magazines, ad money trumps readership and loyalty.
But after loosing 800,000 subscribers, it seems that Condé Nast missed a really great chance to study their Gourmet readers. The magazine may have been out-of-touch with the current economic reality, but its subscribers were still writing checks every year. If Condé Nast saw the end of Gourmet magazine in sight, why not find out what it was that appealed to readers and kept some subscribing for decades. That sort of insight would have been exactly what Condé Nast could have used to align Bon Appétit toward the views and preferences of Gourmet’s readers in order to boost the number of subscription transfers and keep those loyal consumers.
When we write market research screeners, to ensure research respondents or participants are qualified for our studies, we sometimes craft questions that include misleading “red herring” answer options. The idea is to include some answer options in the set that do not relate to the research topic. We then randomize the presentation of the answer options for each respondent so that it is harder to pick an answer just to continue on towards a participation incentive. This obscures the topic of the research, helping to ensure respondents/participants are truly qualified.
For example, we may pose a question similar to the following for a textile category survey:
For which of the following purchases are you the primary or secondary decision maker in your household? Please select all that apply.
- Clothing (continue)
- Automobiles (red herring)
- Groceries (red herring)
- Toilet tissue (red herring)
- Fast food (red herring)
- Laundry supplies (red herring)
- Over-the-counter medicines (red herring)
- Home textiles (continue)
But where does this expression come from?
For a long time, it was thought that the metaphor had something to do with either fox hunting tradition, food preservation on overseas trips, horse training, and/or prison breakouts. In 2008, the Oxford English Dictionary clarified the etymology of this expression, as explained in this totally mental article in World Wide Words by Michael Quinion. I recommend clicking through and reading the full article when you have a few minutes and need a weird break in your day, but here’s an excerpt (and a quick answer):
“OED now trace the figurative sense to the radical journalist William Cobbett, whose Weekly Political Register thundered in the years 1803-35 against the English political system he denigrated as the Old Corruption.
He wrote a story, presumably fictional, in the issue of 14 February 1807 about how as a boy he had used a red herring as a decoy to deflect hounds chasing after a hare. He used the story as a metaphor to decry the press, which had allowed itself to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon; this caused them to take their attention off important domestic matters: “It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent became as cold as a stone.”
This story…was enough to get the figurative sense of red herring into the minds of his readers, unfortunately also with the false idea that it came from some real practice of huntsmen.”
Okay, now you know!
Kudos to The Awl for two fairly recent charts featuring publishing statistics from the past decade. The images are too tall to just recopy in a single post here, but click through to check them out. This trend data, sourced from the Magazine Publishers of America and Audit Bureau of Circulations, respectively, is very interesting, but I’m particularly fond of how they’ve crafted the charts – in a tall, blog-friendly format rather than on a standard wide frame:
I came across this interesting little essay the other day, and it’s been on my mind ever since. As much as we talk about paying for “content” when we buy books, music, and movies, we’ve really just paying for the medium. Books are priced based on the number of pages and whether they are hardcover or paperback. Not the quality of the writing. The most critically acclaimed film at the theater doesn’t cost more to see than the least.
In this new, digital world, we’re beginning to move beyond this. Record companies have been pushing for more tiers of pricing on iTunes. Some television shows are free on Hulu. Some only show on premium cable and DVD. Once you eliminate the physical product, distinctions between perceived quality are able to be made.
It’s no longer about supply, demand, and the price of paper. It’s about quality and creativity.
Anyway. This article is worth reading.
Reuters is generally my preferred online news source, not least for its approach to aggregation of “Green Business News.“ This categorization actually covers a wide array of topics, many of which are rather new to me. Keeping up with environmental subjects is, of course, increasingly relevant, but it’s also great mental exercise. I find aggregation sources like this, updated in real time as the articles are published, very helpful – regular review helps me feel like I’m keeping up, even though consideration of some of the subject matter is new and challenging.
Investing attention and energy in these issues has helped in my work life this year as well, as we’ve seen an increase in interest for marketing research and strategic guidance for products and services in the green business realm. We’re always looking for new information sources – let us know if you have any “green business” recommendations!
A couple of links from mid-May highlighting creative formats for print magazines. Both articles are by Andrew Losowsky for the WSJ. Subscription to periodicals is still fun – I expect that if the content sings, there’s probably a base of creative class readers out there. Maybe some spark of the creative new ideas here will catch fire:
Is the growth in the E-book industry driven by online social sharing?
With the fairly recent release of the new and improved Amazon Kindle, increased promotion through iTunes, advancing reader applications for the iPhone, and more frequent PR and media about readers’ social networks’ growth, is the e-book medium finally revving up?
Scribd is one of the leaders in readers’ networks, and they’re now partnering with major publishers to offer more bestsellers, in addition to the many “paperbacks,” magazines (can’t you get those online in another format?), and business, legal, and government documents. Even the Obama campaign and administration have utilized this service to share documents. Yet despite high purported membership and use, the application is not widely known. This partnership at the very least signals that publishers are treating the network and its related web tools like a platform for distribution, not just a promotion and testing ground.
It will be interesting to watch how this channel is adopted by the commercial book and literature world. If Amazon consumer reviews, Facebook reader applications, adoption and interest in the Kindle, and microblogging through social networks like Scribd are any indication, we can expect growth and advances in the way information about books is shared.
Personally, I would always rather read a bound hard copy of a novel or nonfiction work. I welcome the break from the flashing light screen; I will likely revisit the book at some future date at least in reference; and in my opinion, the content can lose much of its ability to communicate human emotion.
Several years ago when e-books were first being offered online in an experiment in channel, I read Jack London’s Martin Eden while toiling away at mindless deskwork (a previous employer, of course). While I was able to follow the plot and enjoy the language, I didn’t feel the frustration and despair that I got when I re-read it in a physical copy. Sure, maybe one may not want to willingly empathize with frustration and despair specifically, but the thing that concerned me was that the communication suffered. It was clearly not just the case that a re-read was necessary to “get it” – the medium itself failed me. But hopefully these companies on the upstart are also addressing the reader (consumer) experience.
Additional news on this front: Wired Epicenter
