The grande dame of British publishing shows no sign of slowing, despite recently turning 93. Winner of Consumer Media Brand of the Year at this year’s PPA awards, at which editor Lindsay Nicholson also won Editor of the Year (Consumer Media), Good Housekeeping is widening its lead as Britain’s most widely-read paid-for women’s monthly. If anything, her pace is quickening, powered by good old-fashioned trust.
Founded in the US back in 1885 then bought by Hearst Corporation in 1911, Good Housekeeping’s British edition was launched in 1922 with a circulation of 100,000 – a figure that’s since more than quadrupled. Today, combined print and digital sales stand at 404,205, latest ABC figures show. More than half of the magazine’s readers subscribe. And the website attracts 635,000 unique users each month.
What women want
The first clue to ‘why’ lies in an editorial run in the first British edition – a copy of which is pinned above Nicholson’s desk.
“There should be no drudgery in the house. There must be time to think, to read, to enjoy life, to be young with the growing generation, to have time for their pleasures, to have leisure for one’s own – to hold one’s youth as long as possible, to have beauty around us – line and colour in dress, form and colour in our surroundings; to have good food without monotony, and good service without jangled tempers,” the launch editor wrote.
This is as true today as it was in 1922, Nicholson insists.
“It is a universal human truth that women want the best for themselves and their families at the same time and that leads to conflicts of time and money and the need for prioritising and compromise. Good Housekeeping offers a path through all of that,” she explains.
And that path is underpinned by the Good Housekeeping Institute (GHI).
“Because we don’t recommend something just because we’ve had a press release about it or because someone has advertised but because we’ve tried it and we’ve tested it. So we recommend ways, ideas, recipes that genuinely help people resolve the conflicts in their lives and prioritise in a way that’s best for the people around them,” Nicholson continues.
“Every month, when we plan the next issue, we ask: is this worth £4.10? Because it has to be worth the reader’s while, which is why we also have great features that entertain and inspire, and we have very high production values so you can be proud to have us sitting on your coffee table.”
It’s about balancing information with inspiration, according to group publishing director, Good Housekeeping, Judith Secombe. “Good Housekeeping has to be an inspiring read – that’s how we build emotional connection with readers, and when you combine that with trust, you’ve got something very special,” she believes.
Seal of approval
GHI, first brought to the UK in 1924, is both the key pillar of the Good Housekeeping brand and a powerful engine for future growth.
Its aim was always to test products as consumers would use them. Then following the introduction of ‘The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval’, it started recommending products - which it still does today, through the ‘GHI Approved’ and ‘Reader Recommended’ schemes. And the care, attention and impartiality applied to testing everything – from domestic appliances to recipes – has built and continues to build trust in the Good Housekeeping brand.
“The trust people have in the Good Housekeeping brand is fantastic,” Secombe says.
“Research shows even readers younger than the magazine readership’s median age of 51 – and those who don’t regularly read us at all, but use us only for our recommendations – agree that the seal of approval device has huge resonance. They’re not necessarily sure why, or the lengths we go to test things on their behalf, but the knowledge we’ve done all the hard work for them is hugely reassuring – and that’s what Good Housekeeping is all about.”
This also pays dividends with advertisers and commercial partners, amongst whom interest in the new digital platform and the Good Housekeeping accreditation schemes has grown significantly in recent months. Good Housekeeping has long provided discreet consultancy services to product companies providing test results and expert feedback on products old and new, too. And it has collaborated on many Good Housekeeping-branded products.
“With the cookware range we recently developed with Sainsburys, we didn’t just slap our brand on what they wanted to make - it was co-creation. They produced prototypes, we tested them and our cooking team got involved. We fed back ‘we want this’, ‘we don’t want that’ - even Judith and I took them to try at home,” Nicholson explains.
The logic is simple, adds Secombe: “Because if you are putting the Good Housekeeping name on anything, it has to be equal to the standard of the information that we provide. And that’s exacting. But it’s worth it to protect the level of trust on which the Good Housekeeping brand depends.”
Because trust comes with responsibility.
“We’ve earned that trust over many years, so we have to maintain it,” Secombe continues. “Trust is easily squandered if you mess things up, so we are focused on ensuring it is passed down through the generations.”
And this is why two years ago, GHI was one of two priorities – the other was digital – in an ambitious new business plan to expand the Good Housekeeping brand moving forward.
“Good Housekeeping is very well-known – we have 83% brand awareness, which is extraordinary. So we made a decision to protect the print product in its current guise rather than deviate, for example, in a desperate bid to go young,” Secombe explains.
Brand extensions
“So we set out to build additional assets around the magazine, all firmly rooted in the brand’s DNA. Because we’d already tested many, many products we had an existing resource we felt we could use across a number of new products for current readers and also a new audience, including men. The idea was to create a new digital platform that would enable us to make that data more searchable and usable with different filters to create an ever-growing body of information content.”
Good Housekeeping wasn’t first into digital, Nicholson readily concedes: “Which, if we were having a bad day, we could beat ourselves up about.” It had a website, but it was barely skimming the surface of the data it was amassing. Yet waiting until 2013 to consider how best to expand digitally provided an opportunity to build on lessons already learned by others and at a lower cost than if it had moved sooner.
Another opportunity was also evident, however.
By 2013, 80% of Good Housekeeping’s audience interaction and turnover was in print. “There was this whole side of the brand that hadn’t been tapped into and expanded,” says Secombe. “We wanted somewhere people could come to because in today’s digital world, a bricks and mortar manifestation of your brand makes it more credible, particularly for a new audience.”
With Good Housekeeping’s cookery expertise, influence and authority, cookery classes were a logical next step.
So the team set out to upgrade and expand Good Housekeeping’s product testing facility into new, state-of-the-art premises a few streets away from the magazine’s HQ where there was also enough room to build a Good Housekeeping Cookery School. At the same time, work began on building a new digital platform into which the digital data generated by the product testing facility would be more closely integrated.
Finding new audiences
The new GHI, opened in autumn 2014, has since proven a big success, widening the brand’s audience and building a valuable new revenue stream.
“What’s great is that we are now seeing an audience who’ve never bought Good Housekeeping before experience the brand,” Nicholson observes. In consumer research, significant numbers claim Good Housekeeping now feels younger and more relevant, though editorially the magazine itself has changed little in the past couple of years. She adds: “What’s changed, I think, is people have grown into it.”
In the past, readers typically discovered Good Housekeeping through a particular life stage need – such as having a baby, or buying a house – often on the recommendation of a mother or aunt, and their relationship with the brand was forged through interesting and inspiring editorial content which built emotional engagement. Though this pattern endures among magazine readers whose demographic make-up remains little changed, the Good Housekeeping brand is now benefitting from the growth of a non-magazine reading audience drawn to the brand by its need for information.
“We are relevant to anyone who has a choice to make when buying a new product and a desire to research their options,” says Nicholson. “And that’s a very large potential audience.”
Brand expansion over the past eighteen months has required a shift in approach to business models, revenue generation and recruitment as a broader range of skills were needed.
“Typically, we do half-day courses, but can accommodate up to three daily which operationally requires a very different model to what you need to produce a website and monthly magazine,” Secombe explains. “You have to work out where your relevance is and the credible ways in which to stretch the brand, because you can’t do everything. And we’ve been really pleased with what we’ve achieved so far, and that has given us the confidence to develop the brand further moving forward.”
Next developments remain closely guarded. But in whatever direction the Good Housekeeping brand stretches next, a firm focus will remain on the magazine that sits at its heart.
“We are a lifestyle magazine, and a general interest magazine. We will break news stories and run great features. So it is really important we scooped the Sunday Times on our recent Sue Perkins interview, and that we won major awards for our beauty photography – it is all very demanding to keep this going as we try to excel in so many different areas,” Nicholson says. “But it does work, as our recent PPA awards success goes to show.”
Since this interview, Judith Secombe has been appointed group publishing director of Hearst Made, Hearst’s content partnerships division.
