On the Business of Magazine Covers

As someone who enjoy numbers in general and the analytical side of business in particular, I found this recent post on Foliomag, about "magazines shar[ing] lessons from some of the poorest-selling covers of past years" absolutely fascinating. It shows pictures of these underperforming covers and provides a quick analysis of why they didn't sell, along with some hard data (for instance, you can take a look at the Military History cover that generated a five-year-low sell-through of 40 percent, while the magazine usually has "sell-through at Barnes & Noble of 48 percent to 65 percent.")

The post provides valuable insights into customers' buying behavior and made me think more about what makes me purchase a magazine in newsstands. I liked that the covers were not particularly obvious failures - they wouldn't make a customer wonder "what were they thinking?" as he glanced at them, but he would walk away and pick another magazine, along with many other potential readers, unaware that they were all exhibiting the same behavior.

Here are some of the major factors that explain sell-through failures of Discover Magazine and the like:

• lack of surprise - the cover mentioned a familiar topic - "The New Moon", "German U Boat" - without making the case that readers opening the magazine would find fresh information. (This being a magazine cover, such cases are usually made with intriguing pictures, or original headlines. There is obviously no space for written arguments.)
• wrong audience, misunderstood message - Inc magazine put a child on the cover, of little interest to its business readers, who therefore did not pick up the magazine from the newsstands. Also, its "The Success Gene" headline was misinterpreted as meaning that "if you’re not born with what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, you might as well hang it up." 
• reader confusion - the editor at Model Railroader magazine explains, "When we publish photos of model scenes that appear so realistic [that] a reader gets confused... we can lose our audience." For a cover in Wild West about an inspiring redemption story about Theodore Roosevelt after the deaths of his mother and his wife, the editor ventured that "maybe Teddy [not easy to recognize in the picture and named T.R. in the magazine's headline, to make things worse] just doesn’t look enough like most peoples’ mental image of him to connect."

That Foliomag post should be required reading for any marketing major, and probably any business major too. It is wonderful that these magazine editors shared their hard-won lessons with a broader public. All magazines stand to benefit if they can use this advice to improve their own sales. It is hard enough nowadays to succeed in the publishing industry; a poor choice of cover doesn't have to add to the difficulty.

Comments

[Ilyaquant.wordpress.com]

Well, as they say...a picture's worth a thousand words =). Sometimes, those thousand words result in a teal dear :P. (Aka TL; DR--which stands for too long; didn't read).