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Magazine marketers give up on marketing magazines
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I fly a lot less than I used to (and I never flew that often), so I was surprised when I received this piece of mail that seemed to be about frequent flyer miles expiring. It was either open the junk mail or keep cleaning the kitchen, so clearly I had to open the junk mail right away. I was surprised to learn that the direct mail had hardly anything to do with frequent flyer miles; it was a solicitation to restart my subscription to FORTUNE.
This is how bad it’s gotten for at least one prominent print publication: It has to masquerade as something other than what it is to entice customers to open an envelope.
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I get this with telemarketers selling both newspapers and magazines. They usually say something to the effect of, if I take out a subscription to their publication, they’ll give a portion of my subscription cost to some charity. (with the newspapers, it’s usually a local one).
My stock response to this is to “translate” that into the fact that their publication is of such poor quality, that the only way to boost readership is to tug at my heartstrings with the charity. A charity that — mind you, if I wanted to receive my money, I would donate to myself so that I could (1) endure that they get the money and (2) would then get a tax deduction on.
It’s amazing how hard it is to get them to actually sell the publication itself. I even feed them lines about how maybe it’s got better reporting, the photography, the op-ed page, the comics, the delivery. Anything. One woman tried to argue for the coupons in the Sunday paper.