When New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern recently announced she was stepping down from the top job with a word of advice for her people that “you can be kind, but strong, empathetic but decisive, optimistic but focused. And that you can be your own kind of leader”, it resonated strongly with me. For, although clearly not running a country, I have also redesigned my working life, after a period of deep thought around what ‘success’ means to me personally, and to the HELLO! magazine brand, where I am proud to work.
On the first of February, after nearly fifteen years working at HELLO!, as an editor and most recently in the position of editor in chief, we announced the beginning of my new chapter at the media company in the newly created role of creative brand ambassador. More on the Jacinda analogy later.
Creative brand ambassador is a role you will be unfamiliar with seeing in a magazine masthead, but one you would be more likely to find within a consumer brand or charitable organisation, and it has come about after a great deal of thought around the purpose of HELLO! in 2023 and beyond. Let me explain…
HELLO! has been known for our trusted reporting on royal life and our glossy world exclusives taking you into the lives of the famous and fabulous since 1988. We have been doing this in a relatively unrivalled fashion, seeing off the competition to reign supreme at the top of the weekly women’s lifestyle magazine market with a weekly readership of 509,000, and a growing digital empire of 40million unique users per month in the UK and US. Despite a universal backdrop of declining print sales, we have steadily climbed in market share, with a 46 million combined footprint in print, digital and social in the UK, our loyal audience keen to be kept up-to-date with news as it breaks. Yet HELLO!’s success is down to so much more than being a source of Royal and showbiz news. We are world-renowned for our unashamedly positive and kind reporting, and we are extremely proud of this philosophy which makes us a unique corner of the British press.
We launched our #hellotokindness campaign in 2018 with the backing of Kensington Palace and a host of stellar names, because we felt that it was time to take a stand about abusive behaviour in the online world; to say that racist, sexist, aggressive, or any kind of bullying, unkind, offensive rhetoric was not welcome in our world. We are not against freedom of speech, but we were fed-up of policing our platforms and it had reached a tipping point. Each year, we announce our Kind List, showcasing the kindest personalities on the planet and amplifying their philanthropic work; and every week, the online team highlights a star with a kind heart in ‘Kind Watch’. I am sure this empathetic ethos has contributed to our strength and it continues to be at the heart of our brand.
Supporting our readers
With an audience ranging in age from 18-55+, we support our readers at every life stage.
On World Menopause Day in 2021, in conjunction with the women’s health charity Wellbeing of Women, for which I am also an ambassador, we launched our Menopause Workplace Pledge campaign, which has now seen over 2,000 companies and 3,000 individuals sign up, citing that they recognise and want to support employees going through this stage of life and the sometimes-debilitating symptoms that go with it. It was an incredible response.
This campaign later led to one of our greatest beauty partnerships, when Clarins came onboard to promote their Super Restorative skincare range alongside our perimenopause and menopause content, which has a dedicated hub online at hellomagazine.com. Thus, the perfect, authentic, marriage of purpose with branding centred on a shared goal of breaking the taboo around a life stage that will affect every woman in some form. We enlisted the help of some of our celebrity friends and influencers, and personalities including Gabby Logan, Saira Khan, Nadia Sawalha, Ateh Jewel and Dr Nighat Arif joined our mission to share their personal stories and provide information, in a bid to help other women. It was the perfect example of cross-department collaboration, with purpose at its core. There is still a way to go before we see real change at a governmental level around perimenopause and menopause in the workplace, but we will keep amplifying women’s experiences and providing them with trusted information until we get there. We are continuing to work with Wellbeing of Women on initiatives around other women’s issues, like menstrual health and cervical cancers.
The power of purpose
It’s no surprises that these activations have been a success. Statistics clearly show that consumer brand preferences are driven by an alignment of their values and the brands’ purpose (Ipsos study, December 2021) and in Amazon’s 2022 ‘The Power of Purpose-driven brands’ report, it was revealed that the majority of UK consumers (78%) say they love it when a brand makes them feel inspired. As a leading platform for women in the UK, we feel a strong responsibility to use our reach well and this effort is not a side-line, but a focus.
Coupled with this, I have seen my role as editor in chief change exponentially over recent years – no longer the person who works solely across magazine content, layouts and covers, I had become our chief event host, a podcast anchor, the ‘face’ of the brand regularly appearing in commercial partnerships and an increasingly in-demand spokesperson, all of which are essential to the success of a modern media company.
So, it was time to recognise this and get vocal about our power as a force for good in the media, championing the causes and values that are important to women in Britain today and supporting our audience to lead happy, healthy and fulfilled lives. And we can be really impactful in this area.
My new role
So how will we do this? In my new role, I will work closely with key stakeholders in the UK business, especially our publisher Tamsyn Spires and head of digital Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, and their teams, on initiatives like the ones I have described. I will continue to host events including our star-studded, annual HELLO! Inspiration Awards which shine a spotlight on the people – famous and non-famous – who are working to make life better for others; I’ll anchor our wellbeing podcast ‘In A Good Place’ where I chat to household names about how they look after their mental health. Plus, there are campaigns and collaborations in the works including an International Women’s Day event with the charity Mothers 2 Mothers on 8 March. Of course, we are also gearing up to a busy first half of the year, during which we will witness the coronation of King Charles III and we have plans around innovative ways to engage our audience with this historic moment.
There will be plenty of celebrations as well as purposeful moments. We will never lose touch with the fact that women want fashion, glamour and fun in their lives, and this lively mix will continue to be the key to our success. We also have big plans around sustainability – another area that we are working on to authentically show our commitment.
An ambassador for anti-FGM charity Educate Not Mutilate, I will also be looking at how we can use our platforms to take on subjects that support underrepresented groups, and I’ll embark on some projects to see issues like forced marriage and freedom of speech gain greater exposure. We are also putting a focus on expanding our work in the area of diversity and inclusion building on the diversity in journalism internship programme which we have run in collaboration with City University for the past two years, into new areas within our business.
Work / life balance
I will fulfil this role in three days per week, as opposed to the unofficial ‘on call 24/7’ regimen I have operated under for most of my working life – something which is fairly typical of a career in journalism and seemingly increasingly so the higher up the work ladder you climb. It’s no wonder that the phrase ‘tired and wired’ would have been a fairly accurate way of describing my mental health for much of the past year. I found it almost impossible to switch off and, under doctor’s orders last autumn, needed to do something about this before my health took a serious nosedive.
Boundaries, as I have learnt, are a necessity if we are to have the compassion, focus and drive to succeed in all areas of life – and that includes the one at home with the family. I simply don’t want to miss the formative, fantastic years of my children’s lives, and at the ages of 9 and 7, I’m feeling that the next decade will fly past. I want to fulfil all the roles that they need me to have, like being a presence at the school gate, their cheerleader at swimming lessons, the on-call taxi driver for playdates, just there at home, hovering, for those ad-hoc chats in the bath and at bedtime which so often lead to the most revealing and rewarding conversations with our children.
I also want to open up the space for my creativity, so I might have the brain power to write a forth novel and a follow-up to my Be Kind book – creative writing being one of my other great passions in life.
All of this will, in turn, broaden my shared values with our audience and grant me some headspace for generating imaginative ideas to further differentiate our brand from others. As well as, importantly, enabling me to model a healthy work / life balance to others within our company and the industry.
I feel like the luckiest former editor today because my seniors at HELLO! clearly see the potential we have here too. This is why HELLO! is proudly putting purpose to the fore, and I have found balance whilst still doing a job that I love.
So, I hear you loud and clear, Jacinda. This is what success looks like.
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.
