Building brands

You see it every day at the newsstand: a bewildering wall of magazines, each screaming its wares to an increasingly promiscuous set of readers, happy to be seduced by the promise of a price cut, a bound-in yoga supplement or a pair of one-size-fits-all flip-flops. In today's highly competitive magazine markets, the need is greater than ever to create titles that have a distinctive offering, asserting their identity without the need of a marketing crutch. What magazine publishers dream about is true, knock-'em-dead brands.

The B word may be one of the most overworked in the business, with publishers proclaiming the innate brand values of new launches even before they've reached the shelves. As in all markets, there are mere products - magazines with no unique sense of identity - and there are brands, magazines with a set of distinct characteristics that forge an emotional bond with their target readers, an invisible cord that binds them in, no matter what ammunition the competition might muster.

In today's sophisticated markets, it's the job of the brand team - publisher, editor, marketing, advertising, production and circulation manager - to create and build a set of values that go through their magazine like a stick of Blackpool rock. In an ideal world, these values are debated, agreed and written down in a brand strategy document, a meticulous blueprint that identifies exactly how a brand should behave in every area, in order to reach and seduce its target audience.

Editorial content

The first, and most obvious, area to reflect these values is the editorial content which should appeal to that audience with exactly the right feature ideas, columnists, cover image and coverlines. It's also about tone of voice, the type of words used (and not used), the look and age of photographic models, the length of features, the size and number of pictures, the typeface, colours and - critically today - the design. For instance, Wallpaper, the unashamedly upscale style magazine, has its own unique typeface that you will never see anywhere else. This gives its text an immediate sense of exclusivity, even if readers won't immediately know why it feels special. In the young women's market, More magazine's editorial style book dictates exactly which words should be used - and avoided - to echo the values of its young, street-wise audience. For example, More’s writers are banned from using grubby sexual words such as ‘shagging’ or ‘bonking’, a directive that helps create a unique brand ‘feel’ in its market.

The New Scientist brand treads a fearful tightrope in its mix of features: enough content to convey the gravitas expected of a serious science journal, but enough popular science to attract a lay readership too. That it consistently gets this balance right is a core value of its brand. One of the most successful magazines in the mature women's sector, Woman & Home, meets its brand values consistently by reflecting back to its mostly 50-plus readership the fact that they truly feel about 35. Recent coverline: 'Feel confident about your shape, your future, your work-life balance.'

I asked Phil Hilton, editor of Nuts, how he articulated the brand difference between his title and its close rival Zoo in the fledgling men's weekly market. 'The Nuts brand,' says Hilton, 'is all about being fun and essentially normal and happy. So, although we feature many pictures of sexy women, you would not see an adult-star DVD attached to Nuts because the world of porn is dark and extreme and does not fit. Many of our cover girls are smiling, and our humour is cheeky and silly - running against the prevailing fashion for arch, ironic pastiche-type gags.' This carefully articulated house style, says Hilton, is 'enforced rigorously, and new writers coached for months until it becomes second nature to them.'

This 'happy, normal, fun' element is core to the Nuts brand, and comes through on every editorial page. The weekly pictures of readers suffering (sometimes grotesque) accidents are always tempered with pictures of the readers recovered and happy. Says Hilton: 'this allows us to enjoy the gore with a clear conscience. We always assume our readers are decent, compassionate human beings - and it works!'

Distinct values

A strong message coming through editorial, both in terms of choice of content and delivery style, is of vital importance in establishing a consistent brand. But creating focused editorial only skims the surface of how magazines can achieve strong branding. Giles Lenton, of Radical Partners, is a brand expert who has worked extensively with magazine publishers in recent years, and he defines the true magazine brand as one that 'has a set of distinct values, beliefs, feelings and need satisfactions that transcend the product, any specific issue of the magazine and indeed any particular editor or editorial team. People buy products because they want the product. People buy brands because something about the values that the brand stands for reflects their needs, wants and values.' Lenton cites Cosmopolitan as a magazine whose values have transcended its monthly presence on the newsstand. 'I can use the term ‘Cosmo woman’ to describe a person, and we instantly have a feel for the distinct nature of that person, irrespective of whether she is a Cosmo reader.'

That's why brand values go much deeper than the editorial content and presentation. Physical qualities such as paper and print quality play a part, and a title may risk damage to its brand perception if, for instance, it responds to financial pressures to downgrade its paper stock.

Advertising is also a factor in building brand values, and a publisher may deem it crucial to a magazine's brand image only to pursue quality branded advertising, even when tempted to take short-term direct mail advertising to fill a hole in the budget. Part of the success of Grazia, as an international brand, is that quality ads on its pages are a core ingredient of its brand DNA.

Marketing

Marketing is key to the way a brand is perceived, and magazines with above-the-line advertising budgets often face a difficult choice between slow-drip advertising that relentlessly reinforces a brand message, and advertising that is content-driven in order to bump up sales - and ABCs. On a broader canvas, marketing can enhance brand values through event sponsorship - especially in specialist markets - and through reader events, competitions and reader offers. The sharpest brand teams will health-check every single element of the broad marketing message before pushing the button. Readers dissatisfied with a magazine-endorsed weekend break, or puzzled by a reader offer that's clearly out of character with the brand, are consumers who will have had their faith in that brand unnecessarily tainted.

One, almost cost-free, and very effective, way to promote brand values and brand strength is to get the magazine continually quoted in the press, and on radio and TV as the voice of its market. Every time Heat editor Mark Frith pops up as a talking head on a programme like C4's 100 Greatest Love Scenes, the brand equity of Heat moves up a notch.

Point of sale

And, pivotal to the way magazines communicate brand values to their readers is the way they make that final connection at the sharp end - at the point of sale. Here, the cover itself has the most important role to play, by consistently promoting the inherent emotional values of the magazine. Whatever the brand objective is, (to make people feel happy, younger than they are, informed, intrigued, excited, part of a club …) the cover should convey this, issue after issue. A cover-mounted gift, or banded supplement, also has to complement the brand, and the positioning of a title on planograms. Also, the choice of 'partner' magazine, when a title is link-saved in store, also plays a part in moulding consumer perception.

One of the unwritten truths of magazine publishing used to be that, unlike other FMCG brands (some will remember the demise of huge washing powder brands Omo and Tide in the Fifties), magazine brands tended to go on for ever. But, this is no longer the case and, in a climate of multi-magazine launches, reader promiscuity and rapidly changing market conditions, more brands are disappearing to that big recycling bin in the sky. Witness, for example, Emap pulling a timely plug on an iconic brand like Smash Hits, before it existed as a celebrated brand only in the fading memory of Eighties music fans.

Brand maintenance

That's why it is a constant quest of publishers to revisit, revise and update their brand blueprints regularly, and there are many good examples of rapid brand re-positioning or refreshment. Radio Times, a lumpy-looking title in the days before listings deregulation, has re-invigorated itself with challenging editorial, bright design and a younger outlook, without losing sight of its essential emotional brand values. And, just as Cosmo woman evolves, Cosmopolitan changes too: the two covers shown here are three years apart, but both are unmistakably Cosmo: the style and attitude of the cover model, the cover lines themselves, even the colours and the typefaces say Cosmo. More potentially dangerous, perhaps, was the brand re-evaluation of the Times newspaper, where the Thunderer of old has abandoned the posh end of the spectrum and moved with changing times into the mid-market. It has done this successfully from the business standpoint and, arguably, while retaining much of that mystical brand equity.

In a world where loyalty is an increasingly scarce commodity, the real challenge to magazine publishers is to create what Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts famously calls 'lovemarks' - super-evolved brands that are much more than well-defined products. 'Humans are powered by emotion, not reason,' says Roberts. 'It's how we make decisions.'

And, it's the magazines that sell because they appeal to consumers' emotions that become the big brands – the true 'lovemarks'. These include mature titles like Vogue, Country Life, Cosmopolitan, Radio Times and the Economist and newer brands like Glamour, Heat, Grazia, Loaded, FHM, Closer and Now. In every case, their elevated brand status hasn't happened by accident. It's the result of grinding teamwork across every publishing discipline - and the flexibility and courage to evolve. The ultimate challenge for every magazine publisher is to transform their titles from mere products to envied brands: to get their readers not just to want them for what they offer, but to love them for what they are.