Retail Opportunities for Small and Mid-Sized Magazines

By Richard Alleger, Senior VP, Retail Sales, Rodale 

First, let’s acknowledge the facts. To succeed in today’s massively competitive marketplace, retailers must constantly hone every aspect of their operations and offerings. That means that they must demand more from all of their suppliers.

The magazine category, with all of its strengths—reader commitment and passion for magazine brands, over $4 billion in sales, advertisers whose products sell in the same retail accounts—will need to continue to evolve proactively in order to bring even greater value to our retail partners and our shared consumers in the months and years ahead.

All publishers who market their products at retail, and the entire supply channel, will continue to be challenged to demonstrate our shared commitment with retailers by responding effectively and efficiently to their needs.

At the same time, smaller and mid-sized publishers, as a group, have arguably experienced the most fundamental challenges to their businesses as the category strives to bring title assortments, allocations, marketing and all of the core elements in line to achieve the ultimate goal of a model that is more consumer “pull”-driven.

Where do the opportunities lie for smaller publishers?

First, it is clearly more crucial than ever that publishers work with their distributors to use every opportunity to drive home and demonstrate the fact that, in the right store locations and with the right allocations, many specialized titles not only deliver strong efficiencies and profitability in supermarkets, mass merchants and other channels; they contribute to the overall appeal and success of the category. In fact, many small and mid-sized titles have some stores where their sales volumes place them within the top 10 or 50 or 100 among all magazines carried. These stores’ customers are just as important to the retailer’s category manager as they are to the publisher.

Second, publishers can realize their greatest potential by focusing promotional and other efforts on those retailers and stores whose customer bases align most closely with their own titles. Data accessibility (via your national distributor, online and, most critically, retailers) has made it possible for publishers of all sizes to identify which accounts are most productive for individual titles, and devoting special emphasis to these channels is more cost- and resource-effective than attempting to work closely with many retailers.

Publishers can then educate themselves about these key, individual retailers’ core customer demographics and strategies and use that knowledge to create and propose highly targeted promotions.

One-size-fits-all programs won’t cut it. But a retailer will listen if you offer a program that reflects their specific needs—a program that can help that retailer add value, better serve its customer base and, ideally, increase cross-sales, while also increasing your title’s sales. Retailer- and consumer-specific programs provide the in-store excitement that is increasingly important to all retailers today.   

Smaller publishers can also realize significant benefits over time by becoming experts about their own sub-categories, and how these fit within the entire magazine offering and specific retailers. They can work with their distributors to understand the potential upside for the sub-category, and how best to market it and their own titles.

Finally, to partner most effectively with retailers, all publishers also need to be knowledgeable about the performance specifics of the overall magazine category. The One Voice initiative being spearheaded by IPDA and PBAA will provide the industry with consolidated presentations of hard magazine and book category data to facilitate publisher/distributor/retailer conversations about the true value of publications at retail. Publishers, whatever their size, should dig into this data and use it to gain a better understanding of their own positions within the marketplace, as well as to help retail buyers support and grow the category, for the benefit of all.