Viewpoint

Retail's Unique, Critical Roles 
in the Evolving Publishing Model  

By Charles H. Townsend, President and CEO, Condé Nast 

Editorial note: As magazine and book publishers and retailers seek to partner most effectively to connect with and ensure long-term relationships with today's changing consumers, Newsstand Forum invited C-level management at leading publishers to contribute direct commentaries addressing the roles of the retail channel within their strategic plans now and in coming years, and retail initiatives. Forum will publish additional commentaries in subsequent issues, and encourages retailer executives, as well as publishers, to share their views on reading category and overall retail dynamics. To share your comments on these viewpoints or contribute your own for a future issue, please contact us via Feedback link.]   

If we could reinvent the magazine format and business model today, we’d do the same things all over again. Printed magazines marketed and sold at retail attract, engage, and retain consumers like no other medium.

The bond that today’s magazines enjoy with their readers is uniquely strong. Print’s compelling brands speak with distinctive appeal and authority to consumers who find the medium to be ideal—satisfying, rewarding and relaxing. In fact, if you think about it, the printed magazine is a genius format by today’s standards–portable, tangible, easy to navigate, and the perfect showcase for varied, rich content and stunning photography and imagery.

This powerful bond magazines form with consumers is forged at retail—on newsstands, in display racks, and at the checkout counter in stores, shops and kiosks around the world. That’s where consumers, more often than not, first choose our product, forming what we can only hope is a lifelong media habit. 

And our hopes are often realized. Historically and continuously, studies place print above all other media in terms of consumer engagement. And that engagement, combined with the authority of our editorial voice attracts advertisers looking to deliver their messages with more credibility.

There’s a reason magazines are such an enduring and powerful force in the media industry. The format showcases our content and our advertisers’ brand messages like no other medium. And the retail channel showcases our brands so that they get the exposure they need to build critical mass and grow.

But there are consumers we’re not reaching or fully satisfying with the traditional magazine model, and, at long last, we see the opportunity to engage these consumers with a digital product that meets our standards of visual and journalistic excellence.

Condé Nast expects to publish that unique, digitized content across a wide array of devices by the middle of 2010 and will continue to evolve our efforts as the market and technologies mature. To be clear, we expect to reach mostly new consumers with this digitized content, consumers who have historically not selected magazines as their vehicle of choice for information and entertainment services. 

Our commitment to the retail sales of our magazines is staunch and unwavering.  Retail is and always will be a vital source of circulation and of revenue for all parties involved. Additionally, we recognize that the exposure of our brands at retail is a critical element in driving advertiser satisfaction, as well as a continual source of tremendously valuable feedback on consumer tastes, preferences, interests, likes, and dislikes.

As a company, we continue to invest heavily in prime checkout display spaces across retail formats and in cover research to ensure that our magazines have the highest and broadest possible appeal to retail customers.  We are working on a plan to introduce new quality print products into the marketplace and are absolutely open to all new ideas to drive retail sales growth in 2010 and beyond.

Just as retailers have worked hard to develop the right balance between their brick and mortar and online operations to maximize sales and profit, so magazine publishers are seeking the optimal portfolio of offerings to better serve the broadest number of consumers and to grow our overall business.

Digitized versions of our magazines extend our brands, reach more and new consumers, and work in a complementary way to maintain and reinforce the vitality of our print products.  We at Condé Nast firmly believe they will broaden the appeal of our brands across all channels and expand our readership base, which will accrue to the benefit of all parties involved in this resilient and robust business of magazine publishing.