National Geographic: Will Membership Again Have its Privileges?
National Geographic is one of the great global brands. But it is an empire built largely on paper -- the iconic yellow-bordered magazine -- which is now going the way of many of those extinct species the magazine has chronicled through the years.
How does the 123-year-old National Geographic Society fast forward into the future? A recent Harvard Business School case study investigates that very question, as I write in HBS Working Knowledge. CEO John Fahey is into a second decade of transitioning the entire organization for the digital age. So the HBS case is a fascinating exploration of old versus new, with a century-long legacy to both overcome and enlist in the revival.
And it turns out that the organization has something that none of its competitors -- The Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, the History Channel, Wikipedia -- can match. National Geographic, the magazine, doesn't have subscribers. It has members.
The organization was launched in 1888 to advance scientific exploration of the globe, from the polar ice caps to the steaming jungles of South America. To help fund expeditions, NGS invited a select few interested parties to join the society as members. It was an exclusive group, and membership did have its privileges. After launching the magazine, National Geographic decided that subscribers would also be given membership in the society. Unfortunately, that idea that members would be part of the organization, woven into its mission, has been lost through the years. Now NGS wants to replant meaning into membership.
HBS professor David Garvin, who helped write the case, imagines how this might play out.
"You could imagine multiple tiers of membership," Garvin told me. "One is just a subscription, another is privileged access over the Web to a certain set of explorers, where you could ask questions or whose discoveries and expeditions you could follow. Another level of membership might be the ability to join, if however briefly, one of these expeditions."
The risk to the organization from this plan, he continued, is if membership was perceived only as an opportunity to sell you more stuff. "It won't be valued; in fact, it will probably undermine the value proposition to many of their current subscribers. So it has to be something that gives value to customers, and that will be some connection with the (exploration division)."
If you were running NGS, how would you make membership a valuable asset again?
(Photo by flickr user Marcin Wichary, CC 2.0)
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