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[/responsive]Success in today’s niche magazine market comes down to gaining a deep understanding not of the mass market but of your own audience, and seeing the gaps in what the market offers them. And that’s why Physicians’ Life – a new lifestyle publication for doctors that launches this spring – is confident enough to print more than a quarter million copies of their first issue.
Bypassing the mass market newsstand and going directly to publisher Slack Inc.’s existing contacts, the magazine is a departure from their usual medical-related publications.
“Slack Inc.’s portfolio includes medical journals, newspapers, allied health books and digital products that reach a database of more than 400,000 physicians,” explains Bill Mickey in Folio:.
The idea for a lifestyle publication came from the company’s CFO, who happens to be married to a doctor, according to Mickey.
“While the idea was intriguing, the company knew very little about that part of a physician’s life from a product perspective. A consumer title would require luxury brand sales expertise and agency contacts Slack Inc., which excells at selling to pharmaceutical companies, didn’t have. Plus, lifestyle content on money, family, relationships, technology and travel was foreign to the professional medical publisher,” he notes.
Their market surveys helped to solidify the concept, and they set to work building a top notch team, including Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni as a consultant.
How confident are they that this brand new idea has legs?
“Confident enough to spend between $1 million and $2 million on the launch and set initial distribution at 341,000. Typical Slack Inc. products have a circulation between 5,000 and 60,000,” says Mickey.
It’s a natural progression for the medical publisher, and a smart marketing move to create a new print product for a well-established customer base with a higher-than-average lifestyle. We expect their advertisers are going to eat this up.