Applying magazine lessons to consumer brands If you build it, they will come, or something to that effect, wrote W.P. Kinsella in his 1982 novel “Shoeless Joe.” If you recall the book or its film incarnation “Field of Dreams,” you know that protagonist Ray Kinsella follows that disembodied call to action, carving a baseball diamond […]
…a marketer’s job is in part to move consumers from the periphery to the center of the brand community, (i.e., to increase retention and revenue per customer) and also to attract new customers.
Magazine brand management 101 My friend and colleague Peter Hutchinson is a great writer (and a renowned writing teacher). So as you might imagine, I jumped at his offer to compose a pitch letter to help me place this very series of articles. As I read his draft, I was struck by his description of […]
Sidebar to Publishing as Branding In 1997, two Miller Freeman magazines faced a dilemma. The market they had served for more than a decade was rapidly consolidating. DBMS and DBPD both covered the database software market. (The “DB” in both of them stands for “Database”). The trouble was that while databases were more critical than […]
Transmitting brand preferences through the ages Despite my mother’s insistence, I could not for the life of me find a significant difference between Heinz ketchup and generic house brand ketchup (or is it CATSUP?!), except for the price. Even today the 64 oz. Heinz bottle costs $4.75 while the same sized ShopRite bottle costs $3.85 […]