Conde Nast Will Reach Out to Consumers -- In More Ways Than You Think
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Friday's promotion of Robert Sauerberg to president of Condé Nast may be one of the biggest signs yet that, for the magazine industry, this hasn't been just any old recession -- if a bit on the severe side. The appointment of the high-end magazine group's consumer marketing chief to president -- and maybe even heir apparent to CEO Charles Townsend -- shows that while print ads may come back to a degree, the days of over-reliance on advertising are over.
Now, for the big question: can Condé Nast squeeze more money out of consumers? That's a tough one, because, as has been so well documented, in the media business the recession has been coupled with a once-in-a-lifetime shift in consumer media consumption to digital channels, which consumers, so far have been loath to pay for. And, while The New York Times, in particular, seemed focused last week on the fact that Condé Nast has historically charged way too little for its print products that's hardly the only issue that's at stake here. If it were that easy, Condé Nast executives could contemplate charging another buck or two a year for subscriptions, lose a small fraction of their subscriber base by doing so, and still sleep soundly at night.
That's why it seems this is about something far deeper than getting consumers to pay more for content -- or, as digital platforms roll out, pay for more content delivered in different ways. It's about licensing Condé Nast titles in every way they can be leveraged, and also building deeper, more lucrative bonds with consumers -- something Condé Nast should be very capable of doing given the high-end nature of its titles. It's easy to picture the company experimenting with exclusive house tours to subscribers of Architectural Digest, previews for Vogue readers of the fall collections, and exclusive screenings of movies from Vanity Fair -- for a fee of course.
On the less pricey side, there's a glimpse of what Condé Nast could be up to at its online store, which sells everything from Vogue covers from the 1930s in poster form to New Yorker cartoons to the Wired Venn Diagram tee-shirt -- on sale now for only $20! Of course, like everyone else, the company is going to have to figure out pricing strategies for digital products like its iPad apps -- the Wired one seems to be getting some criticism at the iPad store for being too expensive -- but that's only part of it. For Condé Nast, or any magazine company, to be less reliant on advertising, it's going to have to get creative about discovering ways to get people to pay. And that's not just about content.
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