The quest for a cheap and reliable method for developing and launching successful new products is probably futile. Indeed this paper proposes that for a firm to develop profitably it is not strictly necessary to be able to predict how well its new publishing concepts will perform in the future, ie The Crystal Ball. What we need instead is to seek practical ways of limiting the scale of losses when a new product gets into difficulties, ie. Risk Management. In this way, a publisher can afford many more launches with a better chance that some will be successes big enough to outweigh the short-lived failures. The chief cause of runaway losses when a new magazine or newspaper finds itself falling short of sales targets is that senior managers a) have not planned for any other scenario but success in the prelaunch phase and b) have not installed or implemented systems for detecting problems early and taking rapid corrective action after the launch. The researchers have the unenviable task of attempting to contribute to management decisions at all stages before, during and after the launch. That they will allocate adequate budgets for quantitative as well as qualitative reader surveys, and for rapid, accurate retail audits before and after the launch. That they will aim for continuity and consistency in monitoring all aspects of each launch, including measures that may not be under the control of researchers eg advertising page yields, unsold copies, merchandising activity, etc. If such a policy is conscientiously pursued, techniques may be acquired over the years that have increasingly reliable predictive powers. We may, with persistence and luck, find that the organization has brought together a collection of skills, applied to an invaluable historical database, that deserves to be called - despite blemishes and occasional cloudiness - a Crystal Rail.
In the 1960's Tom and Audrey Eyton started a bi-monthly magazine, Slimming and Nutrition, working on their kitchen table at home. It cost them £2,000 to start: some years ago they sold it to a big publisher for £4,000,000. Thats profitability alright: where was the innovation?
This paper is not so much about magazines or micros as about management, and in particular the use of information in management decisions. It just happens that the writer's business is magazines and he has found in the microcomputer the ideal tool for handling marketing and financial information in a disciplined, but flexible and imaginative, way.
The research activities surrounding the successful launch in September 1978 of COMPANY, a monthly magazine aimed at independent young women and currently selling 300 copies, fell into three phases.
This paper represents a progress report on a continuing study of consumer magazines which is presently confined to Europe and America, but which is planned to cover other continents in the longer term. The philosophy behind the study is one that believes the fundamental similarities to be greater than the differences and that differences due to cultural or economic factors can only be properly understood when common patterns have been systematically derived.
Ergonomics is the study of the relationship between man and the machines or tools he uses. The ergonomics of market research tools and their users has been a neglected subject, however. Operational researchers, it is true, have occasionally joined marketing departments in the hope of constructing a rational linkage between survey data and management action. They get few thanks and fewer successes - especially when it comes to the publishing business. Further, the producers of survey data are insufficiently curious about the ways in which decisions to carry out a survey are arrived at, and afterwards they rarely enquire in detail about the ways in which the survey is used once it leaves their hands. They have good reason. Having sat on both sides of the fence and, as often as possible, on the fence as well, I feel emboldened, if not actually qualified, to say a few words on the world of publishing and research, which is not, as you might imagine, about factor analysis or seven-point scaling or significance testing, but about people.
This commentary on the earlier sessions deals firstly with the question of whether market research can pretend to scientific status and secondly asks whether its practical value is not more tactical than strategic.
In this paper, we report some empirical findings concerning the relation between a sales-type variable such as brand usage and a communication variable. In trying to measure communication, people use a variety of different variables. We consider here one variable which is often used, for which much data exist, and which is somewhat controversial. It is "spontaneous brand awareness". This gives the proportion of people who say Brand X or Y or Z, etc. when asked to name the brands of which they are aware but are given no specific prompt or recall aid except a brief description of the product field. The purpose of such a service is to provide a more or less continuous basis of information to assist in the planning and assessment of marketing and promotional action.
This paper concerns the relationship between consumers' expressed Intentions-to-buy different brands in a product-field and their claimed brand- Usage. The results also indicate the extent to which expressed Intentions-to-buy appear to reflect non-behavioural attitudes as weir as behavioural factors. The analysis is part of a broader J. Walter Thompson study of the inter-relationships between a range of behavioural and attitudinal consumer variables, based in effect on data from several hundred consumer surveys.