Publishing powerhouse Mike Soutar is chief executive of ShortList Media. He explains why putting the consumer first is the secret to success.
Publishing powerhouse Mike Soutar is chief executive of ShortList Media. He explains why putting the consumer first is the secret to success.
Mike Soutar has been in the publishing industry for over two decades, working for numerous titles at Emap, IPC Media and Crash Test Media. By the age of 23, he was editing music magazine Smash Hits before going onto rebrand FHM and then oversee lads mag Nuts.
Soutar knows a thing or two about the consumer magazine market and put his industry knowledge to the test in May 2007 when he co-founded ShortList Media, and began publishing the free weekly men’s magazine ShortList. The women’s title Stylist followed in October 2009.
Target audience
Speaking at the Marketing 4 Start Up Britain event earlier this week, where he discussed digital marketing, Soutar revealed that the launch of Shortlist followed a period of extensive customer research.
‘You can have a million wrong ideas but you need customer insight to lead you to the right ideas,’ he told the audience of business owners and budding entrepreneurs on the second day of the week-long marketing series hosted by the Marketing Agencies Association (MAA).
Soutar estimates that prior to starting the media company, he and his business partner spent around £300,000 on consumer research and focus groups. The circulation figures alone indicate that putting the consumer at the centre of their strategy has paid off.
ShortList goes out to 521,713, while Stylist is read by 424,107 people. In fact, Stylist has claimed 38.2 per cent of the women’s magazine market.
In an age where the threat to print publications is forever looming, and where industry cynics routinely predict the end of newspaper and magazine publishing as we know it, this is no mean feat.
Soutar believes that creating publications that ‘meet the trajectory of [consumers’] needs’ is something of a dark art but it would appear that ShortList Media has mastered it.
Hands-on approach
The company’s distribution strategy has also played a large part in the success of its titles. Soutar took the decision to set up a hand distribution business which is now present in 11 UK cities. He says that owning their route to market is particularly advantageous.
September 2010 saw the launch of the ShortList and Stylist websites respectively, ensuring that the titles have a digital presence too. It has also allowed the company to utilise social networking.
Soutar observes, ‘Twitter doesn’t drive the level and intensity of traffic as Facebook’, but explains that it is important to be seen to have a presence on both sites.
He believes, ‘Digital products that have thought about how they’re going to be part of a community’ are the most successful.
Stylist’s daily email Emerald Street is an example of just that – an online community for the magazine’s readers. Some 89 per cent of its audience is female and the newsletter has a high open rate.
It seems that Soutar has hit on the future of magazine publishing. But he also hints that there is more to come from the ShortList Media stable.
‘The next thing we do will be far more integrated on more channels,’ insists Soutar.
