Digests for the Affluent

Magazine publisher Condé Nast has clearly marked out its target — the affluent Indian. Here’s how it is connecting with them

Three years into India, Condé Nast has launched its third title, Condé Nast Traveller, after Vogue and GQ. It prints 50,000 copies of Vogue every month and 30,000 of GQ. The maiden print run for Condé Nast Traveller was 25,000. With higher disposable incomes and better connectivity, travel is high on the agenda of Indians. Naturally, the market is already cluttered. There is Living Media’s Travel Plus, the Outlook Group’s Outlook Traveller and WorldWideMedia’s (a venture of the Times Group and BBC) Lonely Planet.

 

Condé Nast’s magazines boast of cover prices of Rs100. “We are single-mindedly focused on the premium end of the market. Condé Nast understands and connects best with affluent consumers,” says Condé Nast India Managing Director Alex Kuruvilla. It also means that volumes will be low compared to most Indian magazines which can range from Rs10 up to Rs50 at the most. For Condé Nast, such an audience makes it easier to bring in advertisers looking to talk to the well-off Indian. Ernst & Young Associate Director (media and entertainment) Ashish Pherwani says: “The absolute costs may be higher than mass magazines but for advertisers looking to reach niche segments, such magazines make sense because they would not have to advertise elsewhere; so cost per thousand readers still remains lower than straddling a host of magazines.”

Condé Nast, across all the three genres, has to contend with a rash of Indian publishers who hold the licence for global publications. This is a low-cost entry strategy because most of these brands have a high recall in India, especially amongst the well-heeled with exposure to global media. Condé Nast, in contrast, is here on its own. “Most of the competitors were licensee brands. As a result, there was less focus on brand-building since licences could get rescinded. Not just investments, there was also no effort to audit and make above-the-board claims,” says Condé Nast India Marketing Director Oona Dhabhar.

Style quotient
The first stop was to announce its launches in style. Vogue alone saw Condé Nast spend a million dollars on its launch. Around 300 people were flown in on chartered jets to Jodhpur’s Taj Umaid Bhawan Palace. GQ’s launch coincided with that of the Starwood-owned Four Seasons hotel in Mumbai, when the publisher took up the entire hotel. Its use of outdoor hoardings too has been more than other magazine publishers. Condé Nast runs hoardings for each issue, highlighting the cover story and the theme. Dhabhar says, “For Vogue alone we would have 250-300 hoardings across Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. These are sales drivers reminding the consumer that a new issue is out on the stands.”

Most lifestyle magazines associate with one event or the other to build their brand equity. Femina, from the WorldWideMedia stables, has, for instance, made capital out of its association with the Miss India pageant. Condé Nast is striving to establish its events among the affluent. “There is a signature event for each title,” says Dhabhar. Thus, Vogue has a Fashion’s Night Out which is an annual global shopping festival held late in the night. DLF Emporio, an upscale mall in Delhi, hosts it on September 10. The festival clocked 18,000 shoppers this year as opposed to 6,000 the year before. “We partner with 68 brands in the mall, which create various offers from wine, cheese, discounts to foot massage and aromatherapy,” adds Dhabhar. GQ holds its Men of the Year awards that saw an increase of 50 per cent in sponsorship this year. Condé Nast Traveller gave a glimpse of its annual Condé Nast Traveller Reader awards at its launch in October.

Digital display
While on-ground properties would need gestation time, Condé Nast is beefing up its digital presence. The internet and mobile devices vie for the time of magazine readers because of their scope for detailed content. For the premium readers of Condé Nast’s titles, access to both is easy. Nearly 70 per cent of its sales happen in Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore, though it covers over 75 towns with its titles. Internet penetration is high among premium consumers in these cities. They would also be among the early adopters of 3G, which will speed up download on mobile devices.

Condé Nast has re-launched the website for Vogue and introduced GQ and Condé Nast Traveller to India. “These would be the tools to communicate daily with our audience and whet their appetite for what’s in the magazines,” says Condé Nast Digital Head Maya Hari. The websites have a separate editorial team to refresh original content daily. Questions posted on social media trigger stories, making it more spontaneous. Hari’s team also takes note of the way Indian Internet users behave. “In countries such as the US and UK, people consider more than one update a day as spamming. But in cultures such as Brazil and India, people are happy to overcommunicate. So, we have up to five updates on events, stories and trivia on celebrity visits to our office every day,” says Hari. The team times the communication during lunch hours and the end of the day when traffic to its websites and also social networks is the highest.

Vogue’s website has about 100,000 unique users and GQ’s 150,000 every month. The average time spent by them is 5 to 6 minutes. Condé Nast ensures it targets the high-end audience by directing traffic from other websites that cater to them. “If anyone but the target audience visits the sites, they might not like what they read. As a result, our time spent will tank,” says Hari. Condé Nast has also nurtured bloggers to write for Vogue and GQ. “Bloggers in fashion and beauty were few in India, unlike food and entertainment. We handpicked 25 bloggers to write exclusive content for us,” informs Hari. Condé Nast also invites these bloggers to events to make them privy to the universe they write about. Anecdotal evidence suggests the blogs, 75 per cent of which are written by Indian bloggers, have caught on with the audience. The websites have seen 10 per cent rise in visits once blogs were added. GQ has 10 blogs and Condé Nast Traveller has 4.

However, digital in India remains incomplete without mobile devices. Condé Nast is set to tap users of iPad, Apple’s handheld tablet, by making all its titles available on it. GQ is already available on BlackBerry through an application which pushes refreshed content on to the user’s handset. “Seventy to 80 per cent of the content is from the website, but the balance is exclusive mobile content,” adds Hari. The application has gone past 110,000 downloads already. The publisher will put Vogue on handheld devices next, and is figuring out which platform women use the most. The focus on digital has enabled the publisher corner luxury advertisers for its websites as well. From four or five, it now has 12 to 15 advertisers such as Chivas and Mitsubishi. However, competition too is catching up with Lonely Planet exploring applications for BlackBerry and Nokia phones. Magazines in the mid segment such as Femina already have a strong presence in digital.

Condé Nast has tailored Vogue to Indian taste by using local content. Next could be the turn of Condé Nast Traveller. “We want to cover more of India because often well-to-do families have done international destinations to death. They are unsure about finding the right accommodation and so on at Indian gems,” says Dhabhar. The launch issue, as a result, carries offbeat photos from the different states in India and does a story on Meghalaya — not always on the luxury travel map in India.

Condé Nast plans to bring in more of its titles to India. Kuruvilla says, “We are looking at Glamour, Architectural Digest and Wired to bring to India.” Vogue has broken even this year, according to the publisher. The advertising influx and readership  will tip the balance for GQ to break even next year, it claims.