Publishing Trends

In the War Over Market Share, Focus Groups Are a Secret Weapon

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.”