Abstract:

Conventional socio-demographic criteria are increasingly losing effectiveness for predicting consumer preferences, explaining political behavior, and in particular, differentiating readership profiles or targeting media audiences. As a result, criteria such as lifestyle and psychographic concepts have been gaining popularity in media or market research. The challenge for magazine editors, is to translate these "soft" criteria into "editorial style" - in addition to editorial content - in order to appeal to the "right" audiences. The concomitant challenge for media researchers is to devise ways to measure "editorial style" in order to assess the effectiveness of such editorial efforts. For it is differences in "editorial style" which create distinct, unique publications likely to appeal to particular audiences that differ in more subtle ways than can be measured by conventional socio-demographic attributes. This is especially obvious in the case of women's magazines where, typically, several titles are aimed at specific sub-audiences that are indistinguishable by traditional socio-demographics, yet who do respond differentially to the way a magazine addresses its readers ("It's not what you say, but the way you say it"). Our study - a content analysis of stories highlighted on the cover and/ or preview pages of the four leading German women's magazines - was designed to measure a variety of characteristics of "editorial style" believed to be responsible for generating distinct product images, and thereby appealing to specific sub-audiences differing in more subtle ways than can be measured by socio-demographic attributes - or even by lifestyle preferences and psychographic profiles. The results of our analysis did indeed reveal distinctions based on such "qualitative" criteria as rhetorical, pragmatic, and linguistic dimensions of "editorial style", independent of thematic editorial content. We found that these criteria did in fact differentiate between otherwise similar journals in ways that were both meaningful in terms of deliberate editorial targeting and suggestive in terms of market positioning strategies of women's magazines. Thus our content analytic approach can be used to gauge audience targeting or image projection through editorial style.