Low-cost airline Kulula will no longer carry Maverick magazine on its flights, cutting the business monthly’s total circulation by about 66 percent.
Kulula marketing manager Nadine Damen said their research showed passengers preferred to read their in-flight magazine Comic Life.
‘Maverick did appeal to a select group but it is an astute business magazine and our research showed that our own magazine was much more popular,” she said.
Kulula flights carried both Comic Life and Maverick on board for nearly two years.
Maverick publisher Branko Brkic confirmed that the magazine was dropped from Kulula flights in November but added that the exposure to its passengers had been a good marketing exercise.
‘We are sincerely hoping that the people who saw it on Kulula will now go out and buy it,” said Brkic.
Maverick currently sells about 3,200 copies in stores and has a subscriber base of around 4,400, according to the latest data provided by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (July 2007 – Sept 2007). Another 17,000 copies of Maverick are handed out for free, the bulk of them to Kulula. This means that its current total circulation of 24,817 will drop significantly.
However, Brkic says the magazine will soon be distributed with Time magazine to 7,000 subscribers for a three-month period.