Four ways in which magazines deliver engagement
A separate study in 2004 by the Henley Centre, ‘Planning For Consumer Change’ [4] – summarised in PPA’s report ‘Delivering Engagement’ [5] - approached the topic from a different direction. People have become so overloaded with media exposure and information bombardment that it is no longer sufficient for a medium or an advertisement to win consumers’ attention: it is necessary to win their active involvement and truly engage them. The Henley Centre concluded that magazines have the characteristics to achieve this engagement in four ways: trust, support, status and participation.
1) Trust: a friend and advocate
The Henley Centre found that people’s trust in traditional external sources of authority continues to wane while cynicism grows. Instead people are increasingly putting their faith in their closest, most immediate networks of family and friends. Trust resides largely in what the Henley Centre termed ‘MY world’ rather than ‘THE world’. Diagrammatically, the closer to the centre of the concentric circles, the higher the degree of trust there is likely to be.
Magazines dovetail well with the concept of ‘MY world’ because they enjoy many of the same characteristics of a close friend (a point that is further developed later in this report). They also earn a place at the centre of ‘MY world’ on three key dimensions:
- Personal versus public
- Active versus passive
- Choice versus no choice
On each of these, magazines are at the ‘me’ end of the scale: personal, requiring active use, and representing choice. The reader is in control. Favourite magazines become part of the personal networks of trust. Other media are placed further out from the centre, and the more they represent public, passive, choice-less exposure, the further out they are – the more distant from consumers’ own world, and the more difficult to attract trust and engagement.
2) Support: help in managing our lives
People are increasingly concerned with self-improvement. Just as the Victorians were renowned for their self-help attitudes, so the quest for new skills, expertise and insight has led the Henley Centre to call the growing numbers caught up in this trend the ‘new Victorians’. Magazines are well placed to act as mentor and coach, and achieve the depth of engagement that ensues. There are magazines of every type to match the individual’s interests and requirements.
Individuals today bounce through their lives in a more varied and complex way than did previous generations. Most people are faced by a greater number of so-called ‘life events’: changing jobs (repeatedly), moving home, getting divorced, starting an exercise regime, changing from full-time to part-time work, etc. As their life changes and they face new challenges they need sources to turn to for information and advice. Magazines have a significant role here, supporting them and helping them manage.
3) Status: our sense of position, belonging and confidence
Status rewards us with a sense of position, belonging and confidence. It’s not simply how others see us, but also how we see our own selves. Our quest for status is of fundamental emotional importance. The philosopher Alain de Botton has even written a best-selling book about it, ‘Status Anxiety’ [6].
The Henley Centre study showed that magazines can be a powerful way for individuals to build, reinforce and boost their status. A particular title can make a public statement about the reader’s position in the world, and provide the reader with self-esteem. The choice of magazine says something about the reader. ‘You are what you read’. These expressive values can be delivered in a number of ways, such as expertise, exclusivity and badging.
Expertise: making readers feel they are sharing in expertise, specialist knowledge and up-to-date information helps them to sense that they are gaining an edge in personal skills and interests, and that they are equipped for informal networking and gossip.
Exclusivity: magazines can help readers feel they are a bit special and exclusive, elevating them and giving them a cosy warm feeling of clubbiness. Devices such as a letters page, reader offers, clubs, etc help to indicate and reinforce an exclusive positioning and differentiation.
Badging: a magazine makes a statement; it is a designer brand.
4) Participation: a bridge to interactivity
The emergence of the internet, mobile phones, texting and other new digital media has raised consumers’ expectations of all the media they use. A new role for magazines is to encourage participation and act as a bridge to interactivity.
The new media have changed our relationship with information and communication. Individuals now have a more ambitious conception of what they can discover for themselves. If they want to know something, they expect to be able to find it out, and more or less instantly. They feel more in control of information than previously. It’s less of a mass-media world than it was, and more of a personalised-media world. This means more involvement and engagement.
For decades publishers have said that no other major medium puts the user in control as much as print does. When reading a magazine or newspaper, the reader can spend as much or as little time as desired in looking at an article or an advertisement. By contrast, when viewing television or listening to radio, it is the broadcaster who is in control of the time spent exposed to each piece of information or entertainment. A 20-second commercial lasts for 20 seconds and no longer. But a print advertisement can be studied for as long as the reader wants, and repeatedly too.
Suddenly the internet has appeared and overtaken print media in this respect. The internet user is even more in control than the magazine or newspaper reader. Whereas the reader can only react to what is printed in the publication, the internet surfer can choose any topic at all and will expect to find something on it.
A viable new function for magazines is to facilitate this democratic development. Magazines can arouse interest in topics, suggest information sources for readers to explore, provide website addresses in articles and advertisements, and so on. The internet is such a wide open, bottomless, uncharted and invisible world that the editing function which magazines can provide – reviewing a topic and suggesting avenues for further exploration - is a very valuable one. Magazines’ own websites can be a useful part of such referrals, but in most cases they won’t be the main online sources.
Magazines are in an excellent position to do this because of the characteristics of print: the readers are still in control of what they read.