The Economist - Mktg & Advtg Strategy

Running Period: 1Year and still counting.
Advertising agency: O&M, India
Key Person: Sumanto Chattopadhyay


Critical Elements of the Campaign:

1.)Iconic Campaign with a sharp departure from earlier tried and tested campaigns.
2.)The entire campaign sported the colours that The Economist ‘owned.’
3.)No Special price offered in conjunction with the campaign
4.)Cost-effective communication.

What did The Economist expect to achieve through their advertising and marketing strategy?

The primary objective: raise the awareness levels in Mumbai, Bangalore and New Delhi and the National Capital Region.

The secondary objectives:

1.)Increase sampling
2.)Increase subscriptions and
3.)To reduce the cost per acquisition of the subscriptions.

Focus on: Subscription sales, newsstand sales and advertising sales.
Broad definition of The Economist’s reader: Age 35+, male, living in a metro – and not restricted, as one might feel, to corporate top management. We have fashion designers, copywriters, project managers, MBA students. All Ideas people

Nature of Campaign: The awareness was created largely through their disruptive A-Z campaign.

Step1: Mobile updates channel - A first in The Economist world.

Objective: Sampling of content

Methodology: Everyday a message is sent out at 11:00 am to the channel members. The message is either a summary of the Leaders in the current week’s issue, or a snippet of a couple of interesting stories. Directing the person to read the entire story by picking up a copy from the newsstand, or visiting www.economist.com or even m.economist.com (which has been launched recently).

Launched: 4 months back

Result: 35,000 members registered on it. These members were potential people who would try/sample the product.

Barriers to Trial: High Price Point.

Single most effective source of subscriptions: was through www.economist.com.

Insight: People who sampled content online were most likely to subscribe to the newspaper. Hence, a lot of our subscription effort was needed to get people to sample and in generating trials.

The Way Ahead:

Step2: Driving traffic to www.economist.com through online campaigns and previously established mobile channel
Step 3: Introducing a trial pack @ Rs. 1100 for 12 weeks
Step 4: Partnerships such as Jet Airways, ICICI Bank Credit Cards, Deutsche Bank, etc. In all these partnerships, exclusive offers to their customers, with benefits which were linked back to the partner brand (for example, a Jet Privilege member who bought a subscription to The Economist was given Jet Miles).
Step 5: Using the Internet as a sales channel- Online databases and sending out Electronic DMs to them. (CPAs being much lower than other channels)

The Number Game: (Refer to Graphs)

Advertising growth: Impressive 73%.(The South Asia pages have seen as many as 25 new advertisers, including Oberoi Hotels, Kotak, Coca Cola and Edelweiss)

Average monthly Sale: In February 2008, the average monthly sale was 16620 and, in February 2009 the figure submitted to the ABC is 23183!

The growth is despite the fact that, unlike a lot of publications targeting the same reader, The Economist has an audited circulation figure that pales in comparison to those of Indian publications.
It is the area of growth in subscription and newsstand sales which is a final testament to the effectiveness of the marketing strategy.
(The projected 2008-09 average circulation is 19% higher than the corresponding figure for 2007-08).

February 09 figures:

Circulation when compared to February 08 show a growth of 39%
Subscriptions show a growth of 26% and
News stand sales show a healthy 15% increase.

Not a bad end-of-the-year report card.

Launch of TVCs: The 6 TVCs created and produced by O&M cost merely Rs. 14 lakhs.

Bravo!

Costs per acquisition down
Healthy increase in advertising sales
Newsstand sales and subscriptions
Absolute budget that is almost miserly.

With uncertainty being the only certainty in this year, The Economist should be high on every decision maker’s reading list.

With the foundation for growth in place, The Economist’s financials for India should be an interesting to follow.