We are constantly being reminded - not least by the current tough trading climate for print brands - that our customers have way more options than they used when it comes to accessing their information and entertainment. And we are quite rightly encouraged to monitor all these choices with a view to making absolutely sure we maximise our opportunities.
In some cases this can mean embarking upon a rigorous course of brand extensions - witness NME’s recent forays into TV, radio and staging events. In other cases, though, it can mean looking at changing your core proposition to try and capture different facets of the market. And herein, if research tells us anything, can lurk very real dangers.
Sticking with NME for example; a couple of years back a rival publisher decided to launch a new weekly music magazine - the first of such activity against NME in living memory. Now NME is in an interesting place - its demographic was - still is - on the young side in comparison to many of our brands and NME’s audience was therefore predisposed to engage with music on the internet as soon as it became available. Early adopters of what many considered a far more logical and sexy way to interface with music than words and pictures in print - you can hear it, you can watch the videos! - the audience was promiscuous to put it mildly.
Of course, NME threw itself into the fray good and early, and NME.COM is a stately 12 years old as I write and thriving. But the threat of a new incumbent in the weekly music print space posed us a whole new challenge. We did a ton of research to find out what the “kids” wanted and NME editor Conor and I used a bunch of job interviews to quiz some clever people who wanted to work for us about what they thought was gonna happen.
Well, the advice we got back from research and from our interviewees was pretty sobering - “kids” these days liked their music info bite-sized and fast, they wanted a lot of style and pizzazz, they wanted stuff about the scene and they were deeply into salacious pop gossip.
Message received loud and clear… except… this was NME we were talking about. And delving deeper we discovered something that saved us a whole lot of ill-focussed expenditure and misguided effort. While it was true that the “kids” liked this stuff, they actually liked it “elsewhere”. They read their Heat (or their girlfriend’s), they read the tabloids (especially the free ones) and they read their copies of Nuts. But none of this was what they were asking NME to be.
Now, this was during the time when some experts were advising that magazines would have to become more like websites to survive because, y’know, “nobody reads anymore” and “we’re all viewers now, not readers”. Others, on the other hand, said print would have to become more traditionally “print-like” and publish longer articles and bigger, more luxuriant pictures; stuff the web can’t do.
Well, the jury’s still out on all that but Conor and his team resisted the temptation to go hell for leather for the webzine option and decided to listen to the steady call behind all the razzmatazz for cool authority, a filter through the mess and some smart opinion. NME did not become Nuts or Pop Justice.
And then Popworld Pulp came out. It was light. It was frothy. It was funny. It was irreverent. In many ways I suppose it made NME look a bit staid and fusty. But, d’you know what? It wasn’t very good. Or at least not as good at gossip as Heat or fun as Nuts and it certainly wasn’t as sexy as a website. In fact, it lasted all of two issues before the publishers pulled the plug. Sales were disastrous.
Now PWP had obviously received the same sort of broad research feedback as NME but had mistaken overall trend for specifics. As it turned out, the role of a music magazine was to justify and make sense of the more kaleidoscopic web experience, not to emulate it.
And so what did we learn? That just because your audience have started to behave in a certain way and you suddenly seem to have permission to be and do many more things, it ain’t necessarily so. Sometimes it’s best just to… listen to what they’re telling you that you do best.
Your audience today is perfectly capable and extremely happy to interface with their various entertainment choices in a comfortably “silo-ed” manner . In this case, for NME’s audience, it meant they used their Nuts for fun, their Heat for gossip and their NME for musical savvy.
Know your role. Ambition and expansion are good things, sure, but only if they ultimately chime with your customers’ notion of your core values. Here endeth the sermon.