I’m in a packed auditorium filled with women with immaculately blow-dried hair and sparkly tops listening to beauty guru Liz Earle revealing the secrets of how she manages to still look youthful and glowing in her sixties. (Answer: beginning the day with electrolytes, natural daylight, and cold-water immersion.) This is Good Housekeeping Live, bigger and better than you have ever seen it before.
In 2023, the event took place at the Institute of Directors in central London and could only accommodate a thousand women a day across two days. Realising there was a huge amount of unmet demand, under the new leadership of managing director Liz Moseley, GH Live teamed up with Hearst UK stablemate Country Living Christmas Market, to host a four-day super-sized event at the Business Design Centre in Angel, Islington, attended by 14,000 people.
Our compère is none other than Moseley herself, a self-confessed show-off. “Give me a mike and a stage and I’m absolutely thrilled. I got to interview women I’ve admired my whole life including Caitlin Moran, Dr Lucy Worsley, and Anita Rani,” she admits when we talk after the event. But there is a serious reason for her taking on the role, which is to make customers feel as though they are part of the magazine.
“Meeting and hanging out with us so we can deliver a high touch brand experience is the value takeaway. Of course you need to have great talent and it needs to flow and you need to have the Christmas music playing and all those other things, but the thing that makes it feel special is that I’m the managing director of Good Housekeeping and I’m the one welcoming you to the stage and saying, this is where I got my skirt from and can everybody hear me ok and is it cold in here? That we’re all in it together. It needs to feel personal.”
Key ingredients
Each of the three talks stages at the show — Good Conversation, Good Looks and Good Eating — are hosted by Good Housekeeping staff. Even the welcome desk at the VIP lounge is manned (womanned?) by the Good Housekeeping Institute’s head of accreditation.
“It’s not her job to be a customer services person, but she’s the person I trust to give a GH welcome, rather than just a well-briefed events person type welcome,” says Moseley.
Tickets to the VIP Lounge, where customers received a free glass of fizz and exclusive access to book club talks with well-known authors, soon sold out, with capacity for 750 people a day across the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of the event.
The feedback from last year’s GH Live was that the women who came wanted more of an opportunity to go shopping in the run-up to Christmas. It made sense to team up with Country Living, who have been holding an annual Christmas market for the past 30 years. The artisans who came along to sell handmade chocolates, speciality gin and crafts of all varieties had a great show.
“The GH women, particularly the ones who had VIP tickets because they’d had their complementary fizz, were spending and the artisans had a really good selling show which was brilliant, because that’s a key part of the economics of it,” says Moseley.
Whereas last year, the biggest auditorium held 220 people who had to buy tickets for individual talks, this year they had capacity for 500 people. Once they had paid for their VIP or gold ticket — silver tickets were just for shopping — they could come to all the talks on a first come first served basis. On the day, no one was turned away, with a handful of seats left over even for the most popular sessions with Anton de Beke and Prue Leith.
The key to success when holding such a big event is to start early and pay incredible attention to detail according to Moseley. Even so, when they opened for shopping only on the Wednesday, the team quickly realised there were changes they needed to make rapidly, including adding an extra café on the ground floor to meet demand, changing the way a queue flowed to prevent a bottleneck, and moving a selfie point that was creating a blockage near to the entrance. From “bitter experience”, she has learnt that when staging large scale events, you need to try to limit the variables, so despite the new venue, they stuck with a production company they had worked with before.
Commercial opportunities
The show makes money from ticket sales, selling stand space to artisans and sponsorship, all of which is welcome. But the real value to the brand is establishing loyalty with its customer base. This is reflected in real terms by the number of people who signed up for VIP membership during the event, which will hopefully be followed by a long tail of more downstream conversions.
“We sell beauty boxes, we sell subscriptions at the event, there’s lots of ways it adds up to a pie that becomes financially quite attractive, and then you have the value which is about brand engagement, visibility, having an event of that scale with its great big advertising billboard which sits there on Upper Street in London, with your brand on it for two weeks, there’s lots of softer value,” explains Moseley.
It is a significant undertaking for staff, involving a huge amount of preparation. GH cookery editor Emma Franklin had to spatchcock a chicken four days in a row for her appearances on the Good Eating stage. “Live content is as important as printed on the page content. There’s a lot that goes into it,” says Moseley. She admits that in the middle of July, there were moments when she wondered if it was all worth it, “then you go to it and think ah, of course”.
There are things she would do differently next year. In previous years, Country Living had a dedicated food market in the area that was turned over to the Good Housekeeping VIP Lounge this year. Moseley admits, “That was a miss. We need to bring that back.” Next time round, they will also run the talks programme on all four days as there was enough content to justify that.
This year’s sponsors, Absolute Collagen, Hisense, and L’Oréal were delighted with the response they got and would like to go even bigger in the future. “When you get the right partners who understood what we were trying to do, worked with us to make it integrated and meaningful, they really enhanced the event. We don’t feel like we’ve got to put this logo here, it’s all a bit cringe; we have great partners who did a really good job,” says Moseley.
Importance of live events
She believes that live events are vital for magazine brands because they create a unique emotional interaction that you can’t achieve through digital media. In the future, they are also looking at ways in which they can take GH Live as a pop-up at other events where they don’t need to worry about building a stage but can simply bring their content along. Literary festivals are one area they are looking at as the GH book club is an important part of their VIP membership proposition.
“It does allow you to have a conversation with commercial partners who are looking for a different type of conversion metric, or story-telling forum that is slightly deeper, but also with your own readers and customers,” she says. Advertising clients who were invited along were able to see for themselves the opportunities the brand can offer them in connecting them with readers who are only too eager to part with their cash in return for quality products. “It’s the perfect way for us to demonstrate why Good Housekeeping is different, because you can feel the crackle and the engagement, and you can see the spending. It does a job for the brand outside anything we can convey,” say Moseley. For sponsor Absolute Collagen, they are hoping that interest sparked at the show will convert into more subscriptions further down the line.
Last summer, Good Housekeeping acquired a new editor in Jane Bruton, who was thrown in at the deep end meeting her readers at the show. Moseley reveals: “I thought, blimey, I’m going to have to warn her, you’re going right into the belly of the beast here, these are our core GH readers. She just loved it. She came out saying, ‘I really can see it now’. That is invaluable. It’s not like a focus group. It’s a different thing.”
One thing I noticed on the day I went along was the different ages of the women attending — as well as a handful of men. There were friends in their late 20s and early 30s, as well as midlife women and families consisting of mother, daughter, and grandmother. This reflects Good Housekeeping’s intergenerational lifestyle proposition. “We’re not a mid-life brand, we’re an all-life brand,” confirms Moseley. She is determined to do it all again this year with the benefits of the lessons learnt this time round, although the details haven’t yet been finalised.
How can she tell the difference between a Good Housekeeping reader and a Country Living reader when walking round the show? “It all boils down to the blow dry, that’s how you know, here’s a Country Living person because they’ve been in the garden, and here’s a Good Housekeeping person.” Fresh from a windswept dog walk, when we speak on a video call, I think I fit into the former category. Moseley doesn’t disagree. “Well, I didn’t like to say...” If I go along to Good Housekeeping Live next year, I will make sure to blow dry my hair first.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
