Audience Development During the Downturn
Parenting proactively confronts the pressures of mass-market publishing.
While most publishing companies are slashing rate bases or shutting down their titles altogether, Bonnier’s Parenting magazine went a different route—the title has been split into two separate editions. Parenting Early Years will primarily target mothers of newborns to preschoolers, while Parenting School Years will focus on parents of kids in kindergarten through fifth grade.
AD spoke with Greg Schumann, VP/group publisher of The Parenting Group at Bonnier, about the inspiration behind this decision and why, despite the economic downturn, it was the best time to implement this strategy.
“The new editions bring to life what we’ve learned from listening to moms. Readers with older children told us they want more content that addresses their unique challenges as moms of school-age kids, and moms of younger children are more focused on the early stages of childhood. The two editions allow us to provide both sets of readers with more relevant content in each issue, and give our marketing partners more targeted opportunities to reach the moms we serve,” says Schumann.
The development process began in 2007, when the magazine first noticed the way a new generation of moms was interacting with media. “They have grown up with customized media, so the one-size-fits-all mass parenting magazine that attempts to cover 12 years of parenting advice in one issue no longer makes sense in a world populated with thousands of mom blogs, social networking communities and Web sites targeted to every possible subset of moms,” says Schumann.
Research subsequently revealed that readers felt that parenting magazines and Web sites did not fully address the issues that develop once kids start school. “So even though the new strategy began to take shape well before the cloud of doom and gloom fully set in over our industry, there’s no way we could have ignored what moms were telling us about what they needed. It’s the riskiest move of all to stop innovating, especially given the necessary period of transformation that the magazine industry is now facing.”
The magazine has made relevancy one of its core principles. Moms only want information for the issues they’re dealing with according to their child’s stage of development. This fact helped the magazine determine two editions was better than one. “We’ve seen that time and time again in focus group research—readers would turn to our age-by-age advice section before any other part of the magazine.”
The two versions of Parenting, surmises Schumann, lead to a more engaged reader. Plus, he adds, the expanded content fills a void in the market. “There simply isn’t another parenting title that deals with the issues of moms with school-age kids.”
But the strategy also reflects a market reality, says Schumann. “These changes aren’t just unique to the parenting category—it’s no longer a numbers game for any title. The market can’t maintain huge titles that aren’t making real connections with their consumers.”
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