So, according to the women’s publishers quoted in last month’s excellent piece by Sue Grant-Marshall (“The Gloves Come Off”), it’s all about finding a “niche”. This hideously overworked word first appeared in the financial sector a decade ago when niche banks started springing up like Namaqualand daisies. The essential difference between a real bank and a niche bank was that the real bank had a massive balance sheet while the niche bank could barely pay the monthly rental on its swanky Sandton office block. Not a problem though because the niche banks invented something called “intellectual capital”, which succeeded in confusing a lot of clients just long enough for them to be relieved of some surplus cash. Broadly speaking, intellectual capital was the combined brainpower of the wheeler-dealers in the niche banks and the clear message was that if you wanted intellectual capital you had to go a bank that had no financial capital, but if you went to a bank with a strong balance sheet you would be dealing with a grey suited yes-man who was hanging in for his pension.
The problem with niches, as any Roman statue will tell you, is that they are rather cramped. There’s not much room to move around and the niche banks soon found out that the real banks were stealing their ideas and people. Intellectual capital, unlike financial capital, has legs and can walk out the door. As the investors in Mr Dave King’s massively over-hyped company found to their cost, the share price of Specialised Outsourcing collapsed for two reasons. Firstly, the largest shareholder (King) evidently didn’t believe all his own nonsense about intellectual capital because he was the seller of his own company’s shares and, secondly, when the going got bad the intellectual capital started leaving. So the era of the niche bank was a short one and I suspect that the era of the niche magazine will be the same.
Which is fine if you can make a financial killing in a short time, but magazines are not banks and there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of intellectual capital either. I assume Media24 thought long and hard about launching four new magazines, one with the enigmatic title Real Simple (is it aimed at people of low IQ I wonder?), but my gut tells me that it’s a desperate situation out there in the magazine world and desperate times call for desperate measures. So rather than cautiously launch a new quality magazine and build brand loyalty, let’s carpet-bomb them with something that has a maximum lifespan of a year and hope it makes money.
Patricia Scholtemeyer, CEO of Media24 Magazines, argues that “no-one says that there should be only three TV channels instead of 100 so why do we hear the mantra that there should only be 50 instead of 500 magazines?” She has a point, except for the fact that most of us ignore 90 percent of the offerings on DStv. The same must surely apply to magazines, and the more niche magazines that appear, the more confused the consumer will become until they eventually give up buying magazines altogether.
But there is hope, inspired once again by the financial world. When it became very difficult to choose one fund manager over another, the sharks that swim in those waters came up with the brilliant idea of a fund of funds. A group of really clever fellows would choose the best performing fund managers and form a new investment fund using only the cream of the crop. So why don’t Media24 come out with a women’s mag of women’s mags—.the best bits culled from all the women’s mags currently in the marketplace. After all, they claim to be into niches and you don’t get much more niche than that.