Did you ever consider that newspapers were the original targeted media? In fact, it was so accepted that newspapers were targeted that most felt USA Today was insane to believe it could be a national (read mass marketed) newspaper when it launched in 1982.
Today, many believe the Internet is leading the way to the demise of the newspaper. In fact, all the Internet has done is what USA Today attempted to do – reposition newspapers as mass media in an increasingly micro-niched world.
While many business moguls might have you think the current problem facing newspapers is its business model, I believe the real challenge before the industry is a marketing one – repositioning (or going back to its roots) as an effective target marketing vehicle.
When radio and TV were first introduced, they were considered a threat to newspapers, but history has proven that theory wrong. The reason it was wrong was that cost of entry (advertising time) was so high and the medium was so different. Network TV is true mass media. Network radio is as well, but radio was first to come closer to the newspaper model with news radio geared to a regional audience.
Cable TV finally broke the TV mass marketing mentality and soon appealed to local car dealers, in particular, followed by restaurants and jewelers whose egos made them adore seeing themselves in their ads. If newspapers can learn anything from Cable TV it should be to encourage entrepreneurs to feature themselves in the ads instead of their products as entrepreneurial egos trump ROI every time. “My wife’s third cousin saw my commercial,” was a common response I’d hear when accompanying news account reps on sales calls to local car dealers. ROI didn’t enter the ad buy equation, not by that point. The value was more basic.
But as the famous newspaper cartoon line from Pogo goes: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Newspapers have done as much, if not more, to damage their own unique selling proposition than the radio, TV, or the Internet by forgetting who and what they are.
USA Today has done more to change how newspapers are expected to look and their positioning as a mass media and The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are eternally chasing the national newspaper moniker as well. Meanwhile, regional newspapers are being caught in the middle – never a good marketing position. They have the big guns above them and the micro-niched weeklies, direct mail and Internet sites beneath them.
The goal then, is to move from the middle, and not to regain the higher ground. Papers never had that ground. The answer may be retrenching to lower ground and sticking to the knitting. Meanwhile, the first order of business is to agree that the middle ground is not the place to be. Let’s learn from the retail market newspapers cover so well… big box stores do well as do well-positioned boutiques. Middle of the road stores don’t last long. The middle is not generally the place to be for long-term market success.
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