Battle
of the Brands
In
the War Over Market Share, Focus Groups Are a Secret
Weapon
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (APRIL 2002)
If
you wandered into the loo of London’s Grosvenor House
Hotel last month, as did plenty of attendees at the
British Book Awards, you’d have found one of
the more literal-minded brand campaign “roll-outs” in
recent years: stickers slapped on rolls of toilet tissue
and pasted on hand towels, featuring none other than
Penguin UK’s latest tongue-in-cheek tagline:
“What a waste of paper.” Described by its creators as
“a battle cry for the Penguin brand,” the latest salvo
rocketed from the Grosvenor’s privies to some of the
hugest roadside billboards in the UK, hitting Glasgow,
Dublin, Manchester, Birmingham, and London with sly
images from the series. One such image shows a grainy
close-up of a man’s face, with a bit of tissue stuck
on a shaving cut. The familiar Penguin logo sits in
the lower left, and the text says simply: “Anything
else is a waste of paper.”
While Penguin’s brand-building bonanzas have been widely
noted in recent years, what may not be apparent is that
the company’s latest campaign is the fruit of ongoing
focus groups that Penguin has tapped for fresh brand
insights. Long a trusted weapon for consumer marketeers
and magazine publishers, the focus group, along with
a variety of other market research tactics, has been
quietly getting results in trade publishing houses.
St. Martin’s, Reader’s Digest, and Bloomberg
Press, for example, have all used consumer research
in recent efforts to overhaul core brands, dive into
new product areas, or just tune in to reader feedback.
And it’s no surprise that these publishers are finding
hard data vastly preferable to hindsight.
Road-Test
Your Hunches
“There
was something a bit safe and cozy about Penguin,” explains
Joanna Prior, Penguin’s Publicity Director. “We
wanted to challenge that.” Also goaded by increased
competition from paperback rivals, last fall Penguin
and partner Research Business International interviewed
400 book-buying consumers, and found that Penguin’s
“spontaneous awareness” (that is, the number of people
giving Penguin as their first answer when asked to name
publishers) had grown to 59%, up from 39% in 1998. (HarperCollins
was second, with 16%, and Mills & Boon came
in third with 14%. Bloomsbury measured only 3%.)
Once prompted by researchers, 98% of the panel said
they were aware of Penguin, up from 92% in 1998. People
loved the brand. But would they like the ad campaign?
To find out, Penguin road-tested various ad concepts
with “core readers” between the ages of 25 and 40 who
buy at least one book per month. The “Anything else...”
campaign prevailed with its wry sense of humor, and
now, monthly focus groups are studying everything from
cover design to how people choose books to read on vacation.
It’s a flexible research regime, adaptable for any marketing
contingency. “That’s the beauty of doing them every
month,” says Damian Horner, Account Director
at ad agency Mustoe Merriman Levy, which has
worked with Penguin for four years. “You can tap into
every little hunch you might have, and explore it.”
Meanwhile, hunches are easily road-tested at Bloomberg
Press, owing to those ubiquitous Bloomberg financial
information terminals (which are now, of course, available
for photo-ops at Mayor Bloomberg’s City Hall
bull-pen). In a unique twist on market research, John
Crutcher, Co-founder and Marketing Director at Bloomberg
Press, says that the terminals actually provide a rich
stream of brand-building opportunities. Since editors
and marketers at Bloomberg Press have access to terminal
usage data for the entire Bloomberg system — and because
those system users are presumably a core customer base
for Bloomberg books — Crutcher and company are able
to see, for example, if users are flocking to a particular
type of financial chart, equity investment, or even
a whole industry sector. Hence system data is used to
evaluate book proposals, by checking a potential topic
against what’s hot on the terminal. Bloomberg Press
also reviews reader surveys done by the parent company’s
magazines, such as Bloomberg Personal Finance,
which in advance of its newsstand launch surveyed brand
recognition of the Bloomberg name across the country.
Outside major financial centers, it turned out, the
brand was virtually worthless, a lesson not lost on
Crutcher. “If we’re selling an entry-level book such
as Investing 101, having Bloomberg on the spine
wasn’t going to get the average person,” he says. “It’s
important to know how valuable the name is, and when
it stops being valuable. With hubris we could assume
it’s valuable everywhere. And we would pay the price.”
Sally
Richardson, President and Publisher of St. Martin’s
trade division, was not about to risk paying that price
with the January 2003 update of the flagship Let’s
Go travel series. So last fall the company took
a little vacation of its own to California for a round
of focus groups that upended a number of basic assumptions.
Readership was much more sophisticated than had been
assumed of the typical sun-seeking, Kerouac-toting
traveler, according to Mark Fortier, VP and Publicity
Director for Goldberg McDuffie Communications,
which is handling publicity for the Let’s Go
relaunch. So a number of fresh features were added to
the book, including highbrow essays on topics such as
the advent of the euro, or about cultural traditions
in Nepal. St. Martin’s was also caught off guard by
the zest for volunteerism among readers, prompting more
emphasis on socially conscious travel. And readers identify
heavily with the series writers, so more first-person
narratives were ordered up, and the media campaign will
also make authors more visible than in the past.
Indeed, any amount of research can improve the shotgun
approach to marketing. “Most publishers do a great job
of marketing to bookstores, but reaching the reader
is a different story,” says Carol Fitzgerald,
Founder and President of Bookreporter.com, which
surveys readers about their reading habits on an ongoing
basis. “We get instantaneous feedback about what’s interesting
to them.” Recently, for example, one of the site’s polls
asked if readers always knew what they wanted before
heading for the bookstore. Perhaps surprisingly, out
of 728 responses, only 10% said they always know what
they plan to buy. And a poll about online excerpts of
books found that 23% of readers used them to make book
selections (though 18% said they never read excerpts
online). “This is not white-paper type of research,”
Fitzgerald says. “It’s a snapshot. But it gives you
much better information about how to promote to readers.”
Sometimes snapshots are all it takes. An earlier survey
on reading group guides, for instance, turned up some
counter-conventional nuggets of wisdom. “We were surprised
that 64% said they were not concerned with the format
of the book — hardcover or paperback,” Fitzgerald says.
“It was interesting to be able to share with publishers
the fact that if you were going to be marketing a title
to reading groups, it would be a good idea to market
the hardcover instead of the paperback.”
Finding
a Slice of Mind
As
some researchers point out, focus groups are not necessarily
a brand panacea. “Focus groups can be one of the most
frustrating things when you’re looking for new ideas,”
says Steve Xenakis, Managing Associate with research
firm Ideas To Go. “It’s hard to expect eight
to ten strangers to come together to identify a clear
issue.” Xenakis, who has worked with the book program
at Reader’s Digest, relies on multi-day sessions involving
“Creative Consumers,” who are trained in areas such
as naming or new product ideas. It helps streamline
what can be a chaotic process. “Focus groups can be
dangerous, because they are not quantified information,”
adds Lloyd LaRousse, VP Global Market Research
for Reader’s Digest. “They are merely good fodder with
which to develop concepts. But there’s no gauge in a
focus group to let you know whether something’s going
to be a big winner or not.” To find those winners, Reader’s
Digest takes concepts from the “ideation sessions,”
and then tests them in larger mail or online surveys
that target as many as 1,000 readers. Especially given
today’s tough direct mail business, testing is crucial.
“You get very big payoffs,” LaRousse says. “The stronger
a concept scores, the greater the likelihood that it
will be successful.”
Fishing for what Xenakis calls the elusive consumer
“slice of mind,” advertising agencies that have used
market research for other clients are now preparing
to swivel into the book biz. Bethany Chamberlain,
President and CEO of ad agency Spier New York,
says that the company recently acquired the Lord
Group in part “to bring some of the more typical
package goods and consumer advertising planning and
research to bear on publishing.” The point is to anticipate
consumer desires and purchasing habits, and then buy
advertising accordingly. Lord Group President Roger
Chiocchi adds that he hopes to draw on the group’s
proprietary “One True Thing” process, a sort of zen-like
procedure which distills the essence of a brand into
a single word or thought. “It has been very powerful
on the consumer side, and we’re going to be looking
into how powerful it can be on the publishing side as
well,” he says.
Richard
Laermer, CEO of RLM Public Relations and
trendSpotting author, notes emphatically that
test-marketing and consumer mind-meld strategies that
work for other industries could save publishing from
always chasing after the Last Big Thing. “I’ve often
wondered why book publishers don’t do what the movie
business does,” he says. “They would have found out
that they wanted Chicken Soup for the Soul a
long time ago.”
©2002
Publishing Trends
