As the country’s largest magazine publisher, understanding New Zealand consumers is part of Bauer NZ’s DNA. With 21 magazine brands and more than 2.8 million readers in the past year, Bauer NZ is focused on remaining highly relevant for both audiences and advertisers to stay competitive within the ‘attention economy’. Today’s frenetic pace of change in the media space presents unique challenges, and therefore the company needs to evolve its storytelling to keep ahead of competitors and attract new audiences.

Insights IQ has developed two highly engaged panel communities: All Woman Talk and His-Call, consisting of 9,500 New Zealand consumers from across the country. These members are engaged on a weekly basis to provide feedback on everything from cover testing to insights that drive magazine and digital storytelling; from brand health studies to new product testing and in-depth category studies on key content pillars – home, food, health, current affairs, lifestyle, celebrity and travel.

Bauer NZ’s communities provide insights that enable the business to truly understand New Zealanders’ ever-changing tastes and attitudes. Community input from All Woman Talk and His-Call has contributed to creating popular new brands, product tests, and trade marketing. After engaging directly with community members to drive content direction, Bauer NZ identified a strong market interest in Nadia Lim, a MasterChef winner and lifestyle icon, and launched a Nadia featured magazine in November 2016. The first issue of Nadia magazine sold out and was reprinted with sales 74% above forecast.

Using the community to tap into new market audiences, Bauer NZ were able to use community insight to ideate and launch a free premium lifestyle magazine for the “new” Aucklander, a previously untapped audience. The magazine, called Paperboy, which launched in November 2016, came about thanks to a two-year project of gathering insights from community members. Paperboy is already proving hugely successful. It has a print-run of 100,000 per week, and is in direct competition with newspaper inserted magazines.