Maybe it’s counterintuitive to the old-school marketers, but it seems that price is not the determining factor when readers decide what to buy. It’s all about the experience.
Take GQ Style for example.
“We pushed the cover price of GQ Style, which is our bi-annual magazine that is the only men’s magazine focused 100 per cent on style, newsstand only. We pushed the cover price of that from $12.99 up to $14.99 and in the first half of the year we saw a 30 per cent increase in newsstand sales,” says publisher Howard Mittman in an interview with Jameson Doris in Folio.:
The publisher hopes the same goes for their monthly title, GQ, which is about to raise its price by $2 up to $7.99, notes this article in FIPP.
The brand is making a solid transition from a magazine brand to a media brand, with Mittman noting “one of the things I really wanted to do was embed a digital sensibility to the brand and help the brand move from being GQ magazine to GQ.
“Also, making sure that we’re able to push content and advertiser experiences unilaterally across a variety of different distribution mechanisms equally.”
With close to 11 million unique visitors to their site in July, plus the launch of private social club The Gent which hosts several events each month, GQ appears to firing on all cylinders.
Does this mean print has become less important to the brand? Not by a long shot.
“Print will continue to be an increasingly luxurious experience for clients and advertisers because I do believe the opportunities for branding and the opportunities for high-end content consumption still work incredibly well there,” Mittman stresses, echoing what many publishers are saying about print as a luxury medium.