Understanding Your Connected Consumers

magazines_IPCUnderstanding consumer behavior is a core requirement of successful marketing and brand development. Publishers must know and understand how, where, when and why readers are engaging with their content.

The insights gained in doing this challenging work is “crucial,” according to Amanda Wigginton of IPC Media. Her thoughts appeared in a recent article in Research, written by Jane Bainbridge.

Wigginton’s team at IPC was part of a project that looked at how readers really interact with brands in a multi-platform environment.

“What this research project achieved was to identify three new consumer ‘mind states’ as well as a greater understanding of how they accessed the brands across different platforms,” writes Bainbridge. “It is no longer just a case of people turning to a print magazine during a moment of quiet ‘me time’, now they are looking at the brand at different times of the day, on different platforms.”

They identified three minds states—catch-up time, focus time, and downtime—during which readers behave in different ways. And these behaviors can lead to innovations on the part of publishers that will leverage their cross-channel media content in ways that readers can truly appreciate and use.

“So, for instance, memory banking – people talk about their hoards of magazines at home, on a shelf, or they tear out pages and put them in a file,” writes Bainbridge. “It’s all about keeping, memory banking or storing it for when you need it later. If you think about magazine brands on another platform, they make that easier, they don’t take up any space in your house and you can share socially, or you can book mark,” she says.

Wigginton believes that the bottom line of the research is great news for the magazine industry.

“I think what our Connected Consumers work proves is that magazine brands remain highly regarded and trusted. For premium quality, curated content, editors are their heroes. When we’ve done specific research around magazine brands and websites, that’s what really stands out – that they trust that premium content, they’re familiar with who it’s coming from,” Wigginton concludes.