Much (virtual) ink has been spilled about the death of print magazines. While the trend has been happening for years now, the two-headed beast of Covid-era supply chain issues and a steady stream of postal service rate increases sped it up. These days, making the case for print is more challenging than ever. There’s no denying that it’s hard to beat the per-customer economics of digital communication, and many companies — and storied magazine brands — discontinued their beloved print publications in favor of e-newsletters, videos and web content.
As print budgets were slashed and burned, marketers pivoted to adapt to the new reality, learning new ways to tell stories and reach a broader audience. But blasting messages into the abyss of the internet, a crowded email inbox or onto the social media feeds of your customers, where they compete with political rants from high school acquaintances, is not without its own challenges. It is a little less comforting to sit down with a cup of tea to read an article and battle pop-ups and paywalls and other manner of distractions.
From crowded inbox to less-crowded mailbox
Suddenly the old model of curating content, packaging it with beautiful design, and delivering it to your most coveted customers at home — in their physical mailboxes, even! — seems new again. Yes, much like consumers are embracing vinyl records again, marketers are looking to print to expand relationships with readers.
We may be biased, but we love print. And if some recent articles we’ve come across in the business and trade press on the subject are any indication, we are far from alone. Guess what? High-end brands are turning to, or back to, print pubs, but with a twist. This time, they’re aimed much more directly at the audience most primed to gobble them up.
Bloomberg, which recently relaunched its own print version, highlighted the return of print magazines like Nylon, Saveur, Sports Illustrated and Vice. They outline the reality that creating these beautiful publications is an investment in both time and budget, but maintain that the payoff is worth the impact they can have on the audience. The Bloomberg takeaway is that these re-vamped high-end pubs are “a luxury item,” which might be a stretch. We like to think of them as that one piece of clothing you splurge on: It’ll last, and makes everything else in your closet look better.
Speaking of clothes, a recent piece in Business of Fashion cites new print magazines from brands like Nike, Supreme and Madhappy. In it, this quote from fashion designer Guillaume “Gee” Schmidt stuck with us: “We have so much to tell because we do so many things and due to the nature of the world we live in it’s a challenge to just slow things down. A magazine gives us an opportunity to do so.” Exactly right: a beautifully produced print publication does slow you down, in the best way.
“We have so much to tell because we do so many things and due to the nature of the world we live in it’s a challenge to just slow things down. A magazine gives us an opportunity to do so.”
The New York Times reports on the print-pub trend, with an article celebrating the venerable Costco Connection Magazine, which has a circulation of more than 15 million, making it the third-most read magazine in America.
If that publication gets people to splurge on the pricey executive membership, imagine what a great magazine can do for your brand.
Imagining what a magazine can do to help tell your story, reward your customers, attract new ones, retain a foothold in your market and burnish your reputation: That’s what we do. Like every media company, we’ve changed with the changing nature of the communication business. But we never stopped loving, or creating, quality print publications.
