The publishing industry has always been fiercely competitive. This is particularly true with weekly and monthly magazines where the important decision of which cover to choose for each issue has relied largely on gut feel because tight deadlines don’t typically allow for research. Rogers Publishing Ltd, Canada’s largest magazine publisher recently discovered a novel approach to bring the voice of the reader into the cover decision through their partnership with Vision Critical. The result has been instant success.
While magazine subscriptions assist in attracting advertisers, it is often newsstand sales that make a significant contribution to the bottom line. And at the newsstand it is the allure of the front cover that determines whether the reader picks up and purchases the magazine. Rogers Publishing knew they needed to do something different to boost newsstand sales. The research tools and methods they had for testing covers were neither fast enough nor sufficiently cost-effective to adequately test the monthly magazines, let alone the weeklies. Instead, gut instinct had been the main deciding factor in what would appear on the cover of most of the magazines.
Rogers had been working with Vision Critical for a number of years. Aditi Quadras, Associate Research Director for Rogers Publishing, was introduced to Vision Critical’s IdeaScreen tool at a Vision Critical Panel Summit. She instantly recognized the potential for using the tool to test magazine covers. The question was whether the application could provide data fast enough to help Rogers Consumer Publications editors and art directors make the right call on the magazine covers.
“The IdeaScreen tool seemed like a very innovative, cost-effective, and turn-key solution to a very complex business problem of testing covers for a large number of consumer magazine brands with very different mandates, target audience, and publishing schedules.” says Aditi Quadras, Associate Research Director at Rogers Publishing.