Retail’s Need For Fractal Marketing

Stop trying to force all these special interest publications into a more general space.

By Linda Ruth
07/09/2012 -03:03 PM

Magazine and book stores aren’t closing, a speaker said at a recent conference. New ones are opening all the time. Williams Sonoma carries targeted books and magazines related to cooking; Guitar Centers are carrying guitar titles; an independent camera store in your town might have some photography magazines. It’s called fractal marketing.

This, the speaker suggested, is the future of magazines. Stop trying to force all these special interest publications into a more general space, such as at the supermarket, and start looking to put your goldfish magazine into pet stores and your mountain bike magazine into bike stores.

I’d like to convey some of that inspiration to the deciders at Home Depot, who recently eliminated their mainline magazine space. Their thinking? They want to “better optimize the space in the front end of the store for other categories.”

This is a fairly major disappointment to those publishers that have been selling thousands or tens of thousands of magazines in Home Depot. Even publishers who survived the cut are finding new allotment levels inexplicably low from a publisher’s point of view and insufficient to cover the sale that history has demonstrated as possible and likely.

It’s also a fairly serious flaw in the fractal marketing approach to magazine distribution. When I first got into this industry I worked with computer magazines. We put a lot of energy and time into opening up computer stores to carry our publications. Like every publisher that focuses on specialty distribution, we discovered it was very expensive. Stores didn’t always know how to handle returns or pay their bills. Worse, they tended to be capricious: Today, a magazine retailer—tomorrow, not.

Specialty magazine distribution is the long tail. It works online because online there is unlimited rack space, and no inventory to warehouse, no returns to process, no unsolds to shred. In the world of print, it costs more dearly.

Even so, most specialty magazine publishers, committed as they are to finding a targeted audience, look into specialty distribution; and most magazine distributors, committed as they are to the future of print, have a specialty division whose mission is to seek out new specialty chains and bring them on as magazine retailers.

Results are predictably mixed. You can pour magazines into retail outlets that charge an annual fee for racks and sell miserably. Or you can hit it big with a chain like Home Depot—until a new corporate philosophy comes into play.

One approach that has been successful enough to last for over 15 years is that of the Music Magazine Publishers Association [MMPA]. This membership organization is a result of music magazine publishers pooling their resources to market to independent and chain music stores and to create a distribution channel to those stores.

It’s a model that other specialty magazine publishers might do well to follow. Distributors are working on opening new channels, but they have a world of specialty retailing to choose from. Independent publishers approach specialty stores, but without the strength found in numbers they have less to offer.

No one has more to gain from specialty distribution than the publishers in the category. Banding together for marketing and distribution could lead to something positive.

Linda Ruth is Principal of Publisher Single Copy Sales Services. Her book of case studies, "How to Market Your Magazine on the Newsstand," is available at BookDojo.com and at Amazon.