Tag Archives: New York Times

Aug 06

Two Centuries of Brand Building Pays Off

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Today's guest post is by London Peppercommer Carl Foster.

Times2 The balance sheet of most major newspapers looks something like this: 

Circulation – Down
Advertising Revenue – Down
Editorial Staff – Down
Outlook – Bleak

The most radical move to counter this downward spiral has come from one of the world’s oldest newspapers, The Times (Incorrectly referred to by many as The Times Of London or The London Times). Last month The Times put all its content behind a pay wall – the first major, non-financial daily newspaper to do this. It is probably no exaggeration to say that the outcome of this experiment will determine the future of the newspaper industry.

Subscription to thetimes.co.uk costs £1 for a 24 hour pass or £2 for a one week pass. (The daily print issue costs £1.) In the weeks leading up to the introduction of the pay wall, when visitors were asked to register to view articles, traffic fell 58 per cent. The paper’s share of UK news traffic, from sites like Google News, fell from 4.37 per cent to 1.83 per cent.

Losing almost two thirds of your customers overnight is enough to panic any business owner, but  is it really that bad? I don’t think so. First of all, have you lost 58 per cent of your customers or just 58 percent of your footfall coming through the shop door? How many people clicked through from Google News not caring if they read a story in The Times, The Daily Telegraph or, the 800 lb gorilla in the room, the publicly funded BBC? The fact that people should be focusing on (and the newspaper industry rejoicing at) is that 42 per cent of people chose to pay for their news from The Times. That is the kind of brand loyalty that 225 years of publishing gets you.

The other positive is that the people paying to access The Times’ content are a much more lucrative demographic than the froth that washes up on the site from a news aggregator. People see more value in things that they consider worth paying for, and that goes for consumers and advertisers. This is completely the opposite strategy to that taken by another stalwart of the British newspaper industry, the Evening Standard. As I blogged about last year, after more than 150 years, the Standard became a free newspaper. Yes, the readership grew significantly, but the brand, and the value of its content was reduced, irrevocably, in my opinion.

I am heartily encouraged by the apparent success at The Times and what it means for mainstream publishing. Yes, citizen journalism is important, and in situations like the Iran elections it can be invaluable. But don’t discount the big media groups. There are times when only the resources of a major newspaper can tell a story adequately. Two examples of this are the recent leak of the Afghanistan files to Wikileaks, which in turn passed them to The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. The other is the British Parliamentary expenses scandal, when thousands of pages were passed to The Daily Telegraph, which ensured the story was analyzed and told properly and responsibly.

There is much ill will directed at Rupert Murdoch, but as owner of The Times his brave experiment will hopefully prove to be the turning point for a troubled, yet vitally important industry.

Aug 04

Timeless academia in need of re-publishing

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TODAY'S GUEST POST IS BY MICHAEL DRESNER, CEO, PEPPERCOM'S BRAND² SQUARED LICENSING DIVISION.

Long before I entered the workforce I read an article in college called “Marketing Myopia” by
Usps-USPostalService Theodore Levitt. It was laborious reading– not because of complicated subject matter, but because I was two years out of high school and acting my age. I never forgot it. And, in the same way readers refer back to “Catcher in the Rye” or “Huckleberry Finn” (other books I didn’t understand the first time I read them), there are profound lessons that can’t be missed.

“Marketing Myopia”– first published in 1960– provokes a businessperson to rethink and sharpen the definition of the industry in which they have a presence. The more narrow that industry is defined, the more risk a businessperson applies to her or his future. Fact is, too many industries become obsolete once new innovations fulfill the same customer needs– more easily, more quickly, more cheaply. The classic example from “Marketing Myopia” is the railroad ecosystem of the 19th century. Railways and train manufacturers alike had a grip on the industry of getting people from points A to B. But they always (and still) define their industry as one of train travel. If they considered their industry as one of people travel– and leveraged their engineers, government relations, cash position accordingly– they could have been the automobile and highway conglomerates of the 20th century. Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan would have simply worked for Union Pacific. The rest is history there.

I was reminded of this analogy in a Newsweek article last month, quantifying the electronic communication trend from 2000 to 2010. Unsurprisingly, 12 billion e-mails sent in 2000, 247 billion in 2010.  Four hundred thousand texts in 2000, 4.5 billion in 2010. Here’s another trend: 208 billion letters mailed in 2000, and 176 billion in 2010. Where was the US Postal Service (either the service, the infrastructure or the brand name) in all of this?  They rode the contraction train for sure. If they have anything to do with society’s expanding e-mail and texting activity, I haven’t seen them.

What a shame. For centuries, the USPS had a near lock on the industry in which they are now a dinosaur. Like the railways of old, USPS had (and has) staff by the thousands. Consumers across every demographic go out of their way to stand in line and prepay for the service. Its balance sheet is a practical ATM machine that most CFOs would kill for. And the universal experience of pressing a fresh stamp on an envelope is a brand moment no other entity has ever been able to replicate. No doubt– they have stayed atop the mail business. 

Except that’s not what their business is or ever was. The USPS was a driver (and now follower) of the written communication business. And by sticking to paper, envelopes, stamps and metal boxes, they were wedded to the feature instead of the benefit. Imagine having an electronic “stamp” option to credentialize every e-mail. (MS Outlook does have that option, hidden obscurely.)  It may sound inconvenient, but we’ve been doing it for centuries. The USPS could have brought their leadership from traditional postal service to digital communication. Their brand equity was far more embedded in consumer psyche even 15 years ago relative to Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, and most every other way we now express ourselves in writing. Postal service personnel still abound, but let’s face it– en masse at least, they’re on borrowed time. Kind of like trains.

Nearly twenty years after I first read “Marketing Myopia” I spend my days trying to convince brand owners that by testing their relevance in new categories they can rethink the industry definition in which they must thrive. It shouldn’t be this tough.  But lots of managers have noses to the grindstone, putting out the fire du jour, with so little time to step back, putting their company’s futures in peril. Is the New York Times in the newspaper business or the information distribution business?  Are PR firms in the media placement business or the client repositioning business?  Are these legitimate questions?  Does anyone go back to re-read business articles from the early 1960s?  “Marketing Myopia” is worth a re-look.  Unlike the industries it laments, Theodore Levitt’s treatise will never go out of style.

Oct 16

So, how did you feel when you first learned your son had third degree burns over 75 percent of his body?

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My alma mater, Northeastern University, is featuring me in an upcoming section celebrating 025
the 100th anniversary of their cooperative education curriculum (a five-year plan in which students alternate between classroom study and relevant work experience).

I majored in journalism and was incredibly fortunate to land three stellar co-op jobs:

– as a copy boy/news clerk with The New York Times
– as a reporter/sportscaster/talk show host for WGCH Radio in Greenwich
– and, finally, as a news writer for WEEI News radio in Boston.

As I was being interviewed, I was asked why I'd chosen public relations over journalism. “That's easy,” I responded, “I hated asking the 'So, how did you feel' questions to victims of fires, parents of kidnapped children and other people who suddenly found their worlds turned upside down.

I remember my WEEI news editor once yelling at me to track down the survivors of a horrific fire in Dorchester that had occurred the night before. “Get one of them on the phone and, so help me, do not hang up until you ask them how it made them feel!” He felt I wasn't getting enough emotion in my interviews.

I couldn't deal with the intrusiveness of it all. Nor could I deal with the jaded, world weary personalities of the journalists with whom I worked. I didn't want to wake up one day and be as burnt out as so many of these professional journalists appeared to be.

I bring all this up because I see the “…So, how did it make you feel?” question being asked more often than ever nowadays. In fact, it's become a staple of the morning talk shows. Maggie Rodriguez of ‘The CBS Early Show’ just asked the mom of some poor kid who had been badly burned how she felt. As soon as the interview ended, Maggie smiled at the camera and previewed an upcoming segment on women's health.

I couldn't do that. I couldn't keep up a false front or 'compartmentalize' the horror and personal tragedy.

I think it says something about the image and reputation of journalism that, as the media skew more and more towards the tawdry and sensational, we're seeing more and more digging into the human tragedy that goes along with modern-day life. Sleaze equals ratings, pure and simple.

Journalists may pillory public relations, but most of us focus on telling the positive side of a story. And, for that, I'm grateful (and proud.)

Jan 22

Which came first, negative press or poor financial performance?

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I never cease to be amazed at the ways in which the media can whip up a frenzy: whether it’s forecastersJournalism
predicting a storm of the century, entertainment-focused, paparazzi types reporting on some dysfunctional celebrity’s latest miscue or, in the case of the economy, pure doom and gloom stories that make the much anticipated Recession a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My most recent ‘fan-the-flames’ favorite appeared on the front page of the New York Times business section. It focused on 40- and 50-something blue collar types who, having lost their $18-an-hour jobs, have been forced to move back in with their octogenarian parents. Ouch. Talk about grim. Not content with reporting just the facts, though, the reporter felt compelled to dig deep and elicit such quotes as, “I’m ruined,” and “I’ll never be able to dig myself out of this hell.”

The media helped build the dotcom mania of 1999 and 2000 by waxing ecstatic about get-rich-quick schemes that, as we now know, were anything but.

Now, they’re taking the opposite tack and filing one negative story after another. Which begs the question: which came first? The poor economic news or the negative press? My money’s on the latter.