It’s a dangerous job, working in NPD.
You’re always on your guard against the temptation to take what you’ve learned from researching one brand and bring it to bear upon another. You don’t want to discover that the Womans’ Weekly reader is drawn, trancelike, to all things pink only to find yourself trying to import it into the colour palette of Golf Monthly. That way disaster will surely lie.
On the other hand, the privilege of working across so many brands in so many areas can lead to unearthing an emerging trend in reader/user habits or preferences which working on solely one brand might not reveal.
Recently one such trend to surface alongside the crucial need to give VFM (value for money) in our competitive markets is the issue of believability.
I came across this for the first time when attending a research session for one of our esteemed Connect titles. Two groups of perfectly decent and lovely ladies - one in their early 40s, the other in their mid-20s – were quick to question the veracity of a particular cooking feature which involved a celebrity divulging their favourite recipe. Unprompted, both groups said they wouldn’t read the article because, in short, they didn’t believe it.
Now it’s very easy on occasions like this to put such a negative reaction down to the withering cynicism which many editors suspect is always lurking, sharklike, just below the surface of their readers’ placid facades. But looking at the page in question, you honestly couldn’t blame them for thinking it was a set-up.
The celebrity was a cut-out from what looked suspiciously like a press shot, the brief, unengaged intro read as if it might have been cobbled together from a phoner or, worse, by a PR, and the recipe was listed matter-of-factly down the side of the page as if it had been lifted directly from some text book.
Doubtless there were very good reasons why the page looked the way it did. The cost implications of having to do a celebrity shoot in situ in a kitchen up to the elbows in a chicken carcass, not to mention the pragmatic machinations of getting such a shoot done regularly, to deadline, were doubtless daunting but… well, it was decision time for our title. Either the recipe page was important to the brand DNA, in which case it needed a major whack of TLC to make it believable, or it wasn’t worth the cost and hassle, in which case… ta ta.
Either way one thing was for sure: the readers were saying that the manner in which the piece was currently being presented made them feel as if the magazine was trying to con them, which is definitely not the sort of thing you ever want your readers to think. They feel insulted because they feel the offering is suspect – “she didn’t really give them that recipe; they just made it up” – plus they feel that in its “lazy” presentation, you are not respecting their ability to see through a sham.
If they feel so strongly that they’re being slighted, they are likely to determine not to read the article, and then it becomes a waste ofthe paper its printed on.This is not something we can afford in a world where challenging revenue targets are dictating diminishing paginations so that every single photo and column inch needs to punch well above its weight like never before.
And perhaps even worse, one such dodgy page, like the proverbial bad apple, can begin to rot your readers’ trust in the rest of your brand. And that is most certainly not a place we want to find ourselves.
The fact that believability was more than a one-off worry and could be developing into an issue that affects all of our brands came home to me during a recent round of Nuts research when readers’ reactions to the presentation of girl shoots were deeply rooted in whether they “believed” them or not.
Several new franchises had been developed to test scenarios that might give Nuts the edge in presenting girl shoots. There is a constant fear that glamour shoots might become commodified and boring if they are presented week in week out even if they feature the most popular girls so these franchises sought to add a little resonance beyond the traditional studio shoot.
One featured girls in their workplace – we’ll call this Office Hotties – and one was about girls who had recently broken up with their boyfriends – we’ll call this Single Again! The development team produced the franchises on boards and they were presented to groups of young men for their reactions, which were surprisingly negative.
It wasn’t that they didn’t like the ideas or, indeed, the girls. It was simply that they thought the girls used in the stimulus weren’t “real”. They accused us of using models and passing them off as real girls and, like the ladies in the earlier research groups, they felt conned and insulted.
The believability of girls has become critical in the cut-throat mens’ magazine market. Models being passed off as real girls (girls-next-door) has had the effect of eroding confidence, with the knock-on that real girls are now often deemed not attractive enough in comparison to the models who have been used to fake reality.
There is also the long thorny issue of photo enhancement. While picture editors will do all they can in photoshop to make those little bumps and blemishes disappear and keep the models and their agents happy, too much airbrushing can amount to a massive turn-off as the girls begin to look inhuman and too “unreal”.
Believability in the men’s market is all mixed up with the notion of accessibility. It made me laugh recently when the Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove accused Nuts and Zoo of painting “a picture of women as permanently, lasciviously, uncomplicatedly available.” If only it were that easy!
A contemporary mens’ magazine editor negotiating the most attractive balance for his readers between fantasy and reality in girls shoots must find the exercise akin to threading his way through a minefield. Readers seem to be asking for girls who look as if they are attainable – ie. up for a laugh and not out of the readers’ perceived league – while simultaneously offering something beyond the Friday night girls down the local Pitcher And Piano.
What Mr Gove and other do-gooders like him fail to understand is that the modern man, far from being a boorish Visigoth with rape and pillage on his mind, is actually rather a delicate flower. Show him a woman made up to be just a little bit scary, or put him into a fantasy scenario where he feels he is being manipulated or his self-esteem might be challenged, and he’ll shrink like… well, like a willy after a particuarly chilly swim.
In other words, I think our readers are saying that reality is in itself a dour prospect but the very least they’ll accept is that we go the extra mile to make their fantasies feel real.