Abstract:

Most of the previous studies of media are based on reading habits of the audience. The similarity between two magazines is then defined in terms of the audience duplication. A major limitation of this approach is that it confuses the concepts of competition and of complementarity. Further understanding of the qualitative aspects underlying the perception of magazines by consumers is therefore needed both for advertisers as well as for the magazines themselves. The various methods of multidimensional scaling of similarities and preferences whose applications in marketing until now was mainly in the field of strategy, especially of product policy, supply us with the methodological basis to conduct this research. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a new research approach to this problem, based on a pilot study on a limited sample, which could be extended to a larger one.