Introduction In this report I have focused on Vogue magazine. Vogue is a product from the magazine publisher Conde Nast which publishes magazines including Glamour, GQ and Vanity Fair. Vogue is an American fashion magazine and was founded in 1892. The current editor of American Edition is Anna Wintour. The purpose of this report is to recommend a marketing communications campaign focused on the Digital Edition of the magazine in order to increase sales and reduce costs. In order to do that, we will conduct a SOSTAC composed of Situation Analysis, set Objectives, promotional Strategies, Tactics, Implementation and Control. 2. Context/situation analysis The context analysis is a study of what my company and brand is doing now, in order to find out information to set the objectives, strategies and tactics. A context analysis within a marketing communications plan is vital to understand the key market and communication drivers that are likely to influence a brand. (Fill, 2009) The main elements of a context analysis are divided into four. The customer context Vogue targets women between the ages of 25 to 54. The characteristics of VOGUE’s customers are: smart, stylish and sophisticated females.
The main persuit of the lifestyles customers are luxury, exclusivity, design, uniqueness. Every magazine has an specific audience which they target through the typography and the colours they use, the different brands models wear and the sections they have within the magazine. All of these aspects of the magazine aim to represent the lifestyle and ideology of the target market. This is the reason why you can only see luxury brands in VOGUE and a jacket could cost ? 2500. VOGUE’s target market is looking for the lastest fashion trends. Their target arket is divided into two groups. The first group are professional, successful and rich women who are interested in purchasing luxury products. The second group are young women 25-30 years old who love fashion. This group of young women want to keep up-to-date and love the latest fashion news but they are not going to purchase the luxury products. They are average income women who are loyal customers and subscribe to the product. Women want to be constantly up-to-date so the magazine is available through a smartphone app, iPad app, and in a printed edition.
There are also different apps including “VOGUE 365” or “VOGUE Desfiles” which provide the best of fashion and beauty news and behind the scenes imagery. The business context The steps that every company or brand has to esablish in order to be successfull are Sementation, Targeting and Positioning. Vogue segment the market according to different variables, such as age, gender, income and location. Vogue marketers use a demographic and geographic segmentation . Geographic Segmentation Vogue marketers divide the market by country and climate and offer different Vogues according to the country.
There are 17 different editions in 17 countries. The China edition has a different content and fashion than the other editions, for example, the Paris editon. The content of the magazine also depends on the climate. For example if it is summer in one country and winter in another Vogue tries to fit with the customer’s needs and purchasing behaviour. Clothes are a product that depends on the climate. Demographic Segmentation “Segmenting markets by age, gender, income, ethnic background, and family life cycle” (Lamb, Hair and McDaniel, 2009:234) Marketers of VOGUE segment markets by gender: male and female.
They also segment the market by income: medium, high or low. The family life cycle studied by these marketers are if they are single, engaged or married people. Vogue’s target audience is women between 25-54 years old. Vogue has been very successful in getting its audience, however nowadays marketers have realised the importance and potential of the male and young audience. Because of this, Vogue has established different editions such as Teen Vogue, Miss Vogue and Vogue Hommes. As says an article of “Marketingweek”, “Conde Nast says Miss Vogue will be for young women who ‘love experimenting with fashion and beauty”.
At the beginning VOGUE purely targeted women between 25-54 years old, but created these two new editions in order to widen its target audience. After showing the segmentation and target market that Vogue is focused on, we will study the positioning strategy that Vogue use. Positioning is defined as”the relative perceptul position of one brand usually compared with competing brands altough arrange of positioning approaches are possible to achieve” (Pickton and Broderick, 2005). Vogue has its own identity; its brand sets it apart from other magazines.
It is the most valuable high fashion magazine, continuing to position itself as both unique and authentic. They have developed relationship marketing, defined as “Marketing with the conscious aim to develop and manage long-term and/or trusting relationsips with customers, distributors, suppliers, or other parties in the marketing environment”. It focuses on the best designers, fashion photographers and models in order to retain its core customer- stylist women. Vogue tries to provide added value,so the brand has prices that are not cheap, investing in creativity and focusing on quality.
They try to create a consitent marketing mix rto have a long-term relationship with the target market, and they try to crea Since joining Editor Anna Wintour, she tried to improve the status and reputation of the magazine in order to be better that the compentence. She tries to get more aundience sending more accesible ideas of fashion. Nowadays she is one of the most influencial people in fashion, this has helped Vogue to continue having a high influence in the fashion world. The vogue vision is “We want our readers to see beauty in everything”. They want to continue being the main high fashion magazine all around the world.
According to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethics, Vogue doesn’t have a CSR of its own, so this is a weakness for the brand. However its publisher has a strong CSR: “Conde Nast combines the power of our brands, the passion of our people and our broad consumer reach to help support meaningful change in our community and the world. ” According to its CSR, they implement different causes against problems in the world, like cancer. The competiror of Conde Nast publisher is Hearst Magazines. Hearst Magazines is comprised by 20 different magazines such us Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Company and Elle.
The main competitors of Vogue as a brand of Conde Nast are Elle magazine, L’Officiel and Harper’s Bazaar. However Elle magazine is definitely the key competitor. Both are “High Fashion Magazines” and worldwide magazines, Elle is of French origin and Vogue is of American origin. Vogue is focused more on entertainment and fashion, whereas Elle is more focused on health and celebrity news. Vogue and Elle has been over the top for long time, however Elle has spend more in advertising and promotional strategies that has help to gain more audience. As we can see in Figure 1, the number of advertising pages in Vogue has disminished from 2006.
This means that the turnover of Conde Nast has consequently disminished aswell. However the number of advertising in Elle has been more or less constant from 2006. It is true that Elle has sold more ad pages through these six years, but the important is the revenue created for these advers, Figure 1 Figure 2 Internal context An internal context considers he issues within the company, referring to the financial contraints, work culture and values and marketing expertise (Fill, 2009) Vogue publisher Conde Nast saw pre-tax profits rise 14 per cent to ? 17. 3m last year.
The company, which also publishes GQ, said its revenue jumped to ? 34. 6 million – against ? 6. 4 million in the nadir of recession in 2009. However Vogue and the rest magazines published by Conde Nast didn’t do as well as it should be. As a result, most titles are being asked to come up with another 5 percent in budget cuts for the new fiscal year that started Feb. 1. 2013. So basically the problem could be solve earning money with every publicantion, not just through advertising. As there is a cut during this year of budget, also we recommend to find cheap ways of advertising.
The main resource is their strong brand image, it has a good reputation and high position that has been built during almost 110 years.. There is a lot of people who has positioned Vogue as the best fashion magazine in the world. The company also has the competency of executing every market activity in-house, so they keep a strong consistency to the brand image. Assess firm/brand image Assess strengths and weaknesses of product or service (i. e. what are the brand/product/service advantages and disadvantages, unique selling points/ benefits, packaging, price, and design? Internal communications Luxury brands are arriving fashionably late to the digital ecosystem, and high-end publisher Conde Nast hopes they will propel digital spend to 30% of total revenues within the next 18 months, says digital leader Jamie Jouning. External context Stakeholders are any gropu of or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the firm objectives (Freeman, 1984:25). Every employee, consumer of the magazine and the different groups represented in each headquarter are the stakeholders of Vogue. The PEST Analysis is a framework that strategy consultants use to scan the external macro-environment in which a firm operates” After have done the research for the Context Analysis, we summarise the key findings in a SWOT analysis: 3. IMC objectives After analysing the current situation of the company we realised that there are some problems that Vogue is facing. The first problem is that it has tu cut its budget in 5% difficult due to decrease in advertising. Another problem that Vogue has is that they don’t sell a lot Digital Editions because the charges per edition are the same or more expensive that print suscription.
The main reaason why Conde Nast establish these prices is because the advers in Vogue Digital Edition are cheaper, so Conde Nast get less money. According to the current situation we want to increase revenue and reduce cost. We recommend to target up-to-date women who have basic knowledge about technology and they don’t refuse having a digital edition. The focus of my objectives will we these women and the part of my brand will be Digital Edition instead of Printed Edition because you can reduce cost, saving money of delivey, and of printing.
We recommend to use new ways to build awareness of Vogue Digital Edition. The IMC objectives that we purpose are: -Gain 20,000 fans in the new facebook fanpage in order to promote our new campaign by the end of 2013. We recommend to call “We love Vogue”, we will explain later why this name. Nowadays we consider that social media is really important to the success of a company. We consider that create a facebook fanpage with the name of the campaign could be a good way to attract curiosity of the current customers and non-customers. Facebook fanpage provides you a lot of information about stadistics, graphics that elp you to know about who are interested in the campaign, the age, the gender, the country. Moreover create a facebook fanpage it is free so hiring a person to develop and reasing wareness of the customers will be enough. – Communication objective raising awareness of the campaign “We love Vogue” from 0% to 50% by the end of December 2013. -Increase sales of the Digital edition from 7% to 30% by the end of 2013. 4. IMC strategies In relation to promotional strategies, we recommend to use two od the three strategies: pull, push and profile. We recommend to use Pull and Push strategy.
Push strategy requres the identification of distributor needs and through a combination of elements, (IMC) an attempt to meet and satisfy these needs in order both that the supplier and distributor are able to achieve their respective goals. Generally the push strategy is use to raise awareness of the new product, the digital edition. It aimed to sell the product more aggressively than the competitors. Some marketing tactics that we recommend is to get an intermediary as “High Quality Hotels” or different restaurans, according to our target audience, to show and stock the product.
It can be show in an iPad. I also recomment to do e-mail campaigns and display advertisign. We will have an e-mail list of people who has already bought a Vogue Digital Edition during the last month, and we will send them e-mails about the lastest news and promotions. Another way of creating awareness is display a video related to “We love Vogue” campaign on relevant websites and blogs. Pull strategy involves promotng heavily to end users and consumers that will pull the products through the distribution channel (Blythe, 2006) It is generally promoted by mass advert and sales promotion.
The main objective is to try customers find the company by their own. To do this, we recommend to offer a promotion. The promotion is based on get a 15 pounds voucher when you suscribeds for a year in a digital editon. It is not a normal budget, you can spend just 5 pounds for you, and the other 10 pounds are to give to someone, a friend, your mother. With this promotion we try to we consistent to our campaign: “We love Vogue, we want to share Vogue”. But we want to share Digital Edition in order to encourage people to use this new way of magazine. 5. IMC tactics
The main source of the message is the credibility, it has to be perceived to be objective and trustworthy. The message keep consistency to the whole campaign. The message that we want to deliver is “We love Vogue, we want to share Vogue”. This message means that as we love Vogue, we want to share with our friends the experience so we recommend them to read it. But we recommend to read a digital edition because is much better. This is the message of our campaign. Once the message is already established, we want to deliver the it through IMC tools and media.
The are five IMC tools: Advertising, Sales promotion, Personal Selling, Public relations and direct Marketing, these are the primary tools. We recomment to use Advertising. Advertising plays an important role in this campaign. We will try to engage audience, build reputation and change people percepctions of digital editions. We recommend to has a regular use of advertisment in order to maintain the brand image. We should realise that emotion in advertisement plays and importante factor. Consumers view advertising in the context of their experience of the category and memories of the brand (Fill, 2009).
We recomment to display video advertisments in fashion blogs and TV. The fashion blogs has to be really famous, as for example Gala Gonzalez Blog, and according to the TV adverts we will advertise on MTV Channel due to this channel plays lots of fashion shows. The advert that I recommend to use is something really minimal and sophisticated. I have created this video that you can see on vimeo. It is areally pretty 25 years old girl, and through the video you have three inputs: “We love Vogue”, “We want to share Vogue· “Vogue Digital Edition”.
In this video we play with the feelings and emotions that the video transmit, we dont want to sell directly the product. We eanted domething more sophisticated. https://vimeo. com/59201027 Figure 1: Target audience, 25 years old women, sophisticated and unique. Figure 2: First message of the campaign “We love Vogue” Second message of the campaign: As “We love Vogue” “We want to share Vogue” Third message: All this campaign is related just to “Vogue Digital Edition” We recommend to use traditional and non-traditional media. The traditional media that I recommend is the television.
Advertisers use this class of media because this class of media can reach mass audiences with their message at a relatively low cost per target reached (Fill, 2009) However when the dot-com era started, television growth stopped. The advert will be display in MTV Channel, healthy and lifestyle channels, at the dinner time, is when the women come from work and watch the TV. Another traditional media that I recommend is the use of Billboards. The advert in the billboard will be display in the main fashion cities as Paris, New York, London and Milan. If it works, it will be display in every main city of every country where Vogue is published.
Its main strenght is that it reach a large audience, but don’t allow give detailed information. According to non-traditional media, ambient media are a recent innovation and represent alternative to outdoor media (Fill, 2009). I recommend to create a guerrilla tactics because gain in short-time a huge impact. The second non-traditional media I recommend is to use social media, and to create a facebook fanpage called “We love Vogue” because you can get page insights that they will help to learn things such as what times people engage mos, the age, gender, countryside. If yo do a correct use of the facebook fanpage it will raise awareness.
You can invite your friends and customers to your fanpage, and you can create adverts with a limit budget during a period of time. You can choose the people who is going to see the advert, the age, the gender… so you can target the concret audience. The advert created in facebook would be during a period of 9 months, until the end of December 2013. The second tool I recommend is to use Sales promotion in order to add value to the offer to bring forward future sales (Fill, 2009) The main task of sales promotion is encourage people to buy the product, Vogue in our case.
This promotional tool is referred to as a form of below-the-line communication because there are no commission payments from media owners (Fill, 2009). I recomment to offer a voucher of 15 pounds for the people who has suscripted to the magazine digital edition for one year. The voucher will be divided in 5 pounds for the person who is already suscribed and 10 pounds voucher to give to somefriend. With this sales promotion we try to accelerate sales, raise awareness among the people that dont know Vogue or they don’t usually buy it. Moreover as it is a digital edition, the company doesn’t lose money in printing them.
This sales promotion would be developed from the begining of March, until the end of December 2013. 6. Action (implementation) In order to make this campaign happen, the main organisation that will be involved is “Conde Nast Digital”. Conde Nast Digital has different division, each division is responsible for one concrete thing, as the advertising campaign, and the evaluation of the campaign. My proposed budget to the marketing campaign of “We love Vogue” is to spend a 100% of the total revenue during last year just in Digital Edition Magazines.
Usually a lot of companies has a budget of 10% of the total revenue, but I wanted to focus just on the digital edition because and spend all the revenue of the last year because you can see better how you will recover the money in the future and how much was the campaign. If the campaign works, every year will have more revenues provided from the digital edition, so we will do another study to see which is our budget for the future. Every campaign has a lifetime cycle, in order to don’t be boring at the end I propose to innovete in new sales promotion, advertising and another IMC tools for the second year of the campaign. . Evaluation and control One of the main important things in the campaign is to evaluate the overall impact that the campaign has had on the target market. Testing is required to ensure that the intended messages are encoded correctly and are capable of being decoded accurately by the target market. (Fill, 200) To messure how good has been the campaign as a whole we will make two test, a pre-test in order to evaluate how people perceive the brand, if they know about digital editions, what they think about the digital editions, what things they would change to improve.
A will make a post-test in order to see how has change the perception about the brand, if they start to buy Vogue digital edition after the campaign, what thinghs they like about the campaign, among others questions that we will ask. I proposed to do four focus groups of 10 people before the campaign, and four more focus gropus of 10 people after the campaign. To measure the effectiveness of the facebook advertisment is easy because facebook provides you all the insights, likes, reach, engaged users and virability.
So if our objective is to get 20,000 fans by the end of 2013, we will look at the data provide by facebook and we will see if we get the objective. To measure the effectiveness of sales promotion we will develop inquiry test. Inquiry test can take the form of retourned coupons. Inquiry test can be used to test a campaign in which responses are accumulated. (Fill, 2009). For example, in our case, we will know the number of people who come due to the “voucher of 15 pounds”. We will have a database, wherethe promotional code of every person will be demand.
To evalueate how has work the video adverstisment in TV and blogs, and the billboard we will use recall test. The recall test are designed to assess the impression that a particular advertisement have made on the memory. (Fill, 2009). The recall test are made the day after launching an advertisment. The recall test we will do it for 100 people. We will ask questions like: Do you remember the lastes campaign of Vogue? or Have you seen the lastest video advert of Vogue? If yes, do you know what is the message of the advert? 8. Conclusion
You need to end your assignment with a brief conclusion. Useful pointers: a. Remember to evidence you have read around the subject outside lectures (see pages 3 and 4 of the module document for suggested reading, and, the guided reading list on NOW) b. Use Harvard referencing (if you are unsure how to Harvard reference then see page 6 of the module for a link to help you understand this) REFERENCES http://www. marketingpower. com/_layouts/Dictionary. aspx? dLetter=R http://www. grin. com/en/e-book/104643/representations-and-ideologies-in-lifestyle-magazines-vogue-and-cosmopolitan ttp://www. news. com. au/lifestyle/fashion-beauty/what-women-want-from-magazines -in-2012/story-fnet01u7-1226464061002#ixzz2K93sqsTH http://www. news. com. au/lifestyle/fashion-beauty/what-women-want-from-magazines-in-2012/story-fnet01u7-1226464061002 http://journalism. winchester. ac. uk/? page=254 Definition of Positioning Pickton Positioning strategy http://www. marketing91. com/positioning-strategies/ FT Magazines pay the price of cheap subscriptions http://blogs. ft. com/businessblog/2010/08/magazines-pay-the-price-of-cheap-subscriptions/ ttp://www. wwd. com/media-news/fashion-memopad/cond-nast-restructuring-underway-to-integrate-print-and-digital-6070426 http://wallblog. co. uk/2012/10/17/conde-nast-expects-digital-to-generate-30-of-total-revenue-in-2014/ http://www. mediapost. com/publications/article/184615/conde-nast-looking-at-5-budget-cuts-in-13. html#ixzz2KGnJoSCw http://academic. mintel. com/display/479845/? highlight=true Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking: Theory, Responsibility and Engagement Escrito por Jorg Andriof Marketing Autor:Charles W Lamb; Joseph F Hair; Carl D McDaniel
