The press

Woman trouble

Johnson

Some eyebrows were raised by a recent , apocalyptic statement from Gerry vvyaveldr, managing director, sales and

distribution, of the International Publishing Corporation. Wynveldt said that

IPC's four mass-circulation women's weeklies, Woman's Own, Woman, wn's Weekly and Woman's Realm, now in inexorable decline: 'We don't mink they'll last twenty-five years' was his Pro h pneey. The news, if true, is of some MIPortance. IPC is our biggest magazine Publisher and these four weeklies account or half the magazine division's sales revenue and three quarters of its profits. woman's Own alone made £7 million last Year'

wYnveldt's knocking statement,

headlines in the adman's weekly, Cam: Paign, drew furious protests from within the trade. One media director called the Prophecy 'incredible' and 'the most negative view of his product that I have ever neard from a publisher'. It would do 'im- mense harm' in 'demoralising the advertise- inent sales staff' and `destroying the con- fidence of both advertisers and their agen- cies in his publications'.

Yes: but is it true? Mass-circulation

women's mags have been hit by TV like all the other pre-TV mediagiants. After all, what now remains of Illustrated or Picture tht7st, once so popular nd powerful? When tneY went down the draain, it was said that

ey were too 'general' and that the "men's weeklies would survive because the `specialised'. Now the theory "eerry were is to be that the latter are now too

lies and that it is the women's month- , with specialised aims and markets, which will survive. Certainly, consumer Magazines as such are in slow decline. Their share of all adverts fell from 9.5 per cent in ,979 to 7,9 per cent last year and is still fall- ing. Sales of the big four women's mags are down on last year. A' relaunch' of IPC Realm last autumn, which cost p .0 three quarters of a million, was a (allure. It initially put on 40,000 copies but wYnveldt says sales are now back where

they were. His policy seems to be to use the weeklies to promote monthlies: `to find areas which the monthlies can make inroads i nto' .

I don't believe anything is inexorable in publishing. But it is for the most part an oldfashioned and prejudiced industry, con- tent to keep on until sales slide badly; then it desperately clutches at every trendy straw that's floating by — a formula for disaster. Undoubtedly, magazines don't pay enough attention to changing techni- ques in marketing: they tend to print the stuff, hand it over to wholesalers and then, if it doesn't sell, sack the editor. This is the view of Jim Bilton, marketing manager of the distributing firm Comag. He agrees the women's weeklies are a declining sector but thinks the mag market as a whole, long in overall decline, is due to stabilise and then grow. There may be some truth in this, for TV itself — at any rate the duopoly sector — is now in long-term decay. But Bilton thinks more sophisticated marketing will be needed to confirm this trend and instances a method employed by Comag to push the sales of this august journal in Scotland. It took the form of selective leafleting of possible buyers who had been listed on a basis of census data and produced a 31 per cent rise in sales, much of which has stuck.

The difficulty is that people in pub- lishing, once described as 'a profession for gentlemen', do not like to think that their products are, in marketing terms, exactly like groceries and have to be sold as such. The unwillingness to recognise this brutal fact of life explains why return on capital in publishing is so much lower than in most trades and why its products have such low survival value. If you consider, for in- stance, that Alfred Harmsworth went into magazine publishing in 1887, the year after William Lever went into soap — and both were equally good at manufacturing their products — it's significant that Lever's `titles' are still very much with us — Lux, Lifebuoy, Persil, Stork etc — whereas whatever happended to Answers, Titbits

and so many other Harmsworth block- busters of yore? It's no use saying that tastes and technology in magazines change. Tastes and technology change in soap too — at this very moment, Lever Brothers and J. Walter Thompson are spending £4 million to promote a 'New System Persil', based (or so it is claimed) on revolutionary technology.

Writing in Campaign recently, Harold Lind argued that magazines, unlike groceries, have not, for instance, gone through the 'merchandising revolution', launched by Proctor & Gamble, under which the manufacturers took over directly the display and stocking of the product in shops, cutting out the wholesaler and work- ing in close partnership with the retailer. He described an attempt by IPC to apply this same method to push three of its titles, True Magazine, Practical Electronics and Honey, in the Tyne-Tees areas earlier this year. This April-June experiment produced specta- cular sales-increases which 'continued significantly for at least two months after the promotion had stopped'.

In the meantime, however, falling sales in Fleet Street still produce the management impulse of 'sack the editor'. As it happens, the editor of Honey, Carol Sailer, has just been sacked for this very reason — a drop from 200,000 to 149,000 a month. John Mellon, managing director of IPC women's mags, castigated Sarler's strategy (she was earlier on Radio 4 current affairs and the Sunday Times) of shifting emphasis away from fashion and beauty and towards politics and the arts. The trouble with this ploy, of course, is that it's always left-wing politics and experimental arts, and neither is popular outside the media. I noted two significant items in the September issue of Honey. Writing an attack on the head- mistress of her old convent school, Honey senior feature writer Sarah Mower says this poor old nun still figures in her sub- conscious 'along with recurring dreams about nuclear war and being chased by nameless fascists'. Now this is a real giveaway. I'll bet the vast majority of women, including Honey readers, do not have dreams about nuclear war, let alone recurring ones, and while they undoubtedly dream about being chased by all kinds of men and Things, I don't believe that `fascists' ever come into it. The issue con- cluded with a profile of John Pilger, the grotesquely over-publicised left-wing bore. So I see exactly what Mellon was getting at. One factor in the decline of women's mags has undoubtedly been the nervous feeling among editors that they must genuflect to the women's movement with its built-in left bias and its increasingly strident anti- men tone. So I have a lot of sympathy with Deirdre McSharry, Britain's best woman editor, who keeps Cosmopolitan healthy and thinks the sex war is now old hat. She told John Cunningham, who contributed an enlightening series on women's publica- tions to the Guardian last week: 'We're in- terested in establishing a truce. We've got a phrase in the office — "Men Bleed Too".'