This week on The Publisher Podcast we speak to Katie Vanneck Smith, CEO at Hearst UK. Katie’s career spans The Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph, as well as co-founding Tortoise. In the two years since joining Hearst, the company has launched and revamped membership programmes for Elle, Good Housekeeping, Men’s Health and Women’s Health, and soon Prima and Runner’s World.
Katie talks about subscriptions versus memberships, the importance of publishing teams, the future of print, and what the point is of industry associations as she takes up her role as chair of the PPA. She also dives into the formulas that make memberships successful.
Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity:
Were Hearst late to the membership party?
I think magazines in general were less disrupted by digital. So some of the headwinds that the news industry I grew up in dealt with in the early noughties, which meant that 2010 through to 2015, you saw that move towards digital subscriptions. Magazines were not seeing some of the disruption around convenience, because the digital ecosystem did disrupt the daily habits before it disrupted monthly passion habits, and social media developed later.
So I think if you’re comparing it to news, yes, magazines are late [at Hearst]. But if you’re taking magazines as their own part of the publishing and media ecosystem, I don’t think Hearst is particularly late. There had been a few attempts and tests, even in Hearst we did Women’s and Men’s Health before I arrived. [Those are] quite a lot different now because we’ve taken the lessons of those early tests and developed better propositions over the last couple of years; Grazia had a beauty proposition, Vogue had a test over here, but it wasn’t something that you felt the magazine industry had leaned into.
The magazine industry in general has got a lot of lessons it can take from what the book industry has done, and what the news industry has done. In many ways, being late to the party does actually mean you’ve got a lot of stuff that you can leapfrog so you can actually go a bit faster when you finally turn up and start joining in.
Defining a good membership offering
We have got legacy businesses where people have been paying to have an ongoing relationship. We’ve had subscription businesses for a long time, and they’re a core part of the offering. So you don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
When we build our memberships, the formulas that we bring to bear is, we think about some of the behavioural economics that underpins good subscriptions. So always have three, always put them side by side, always explain the benefits of each product… Some of the formulas, because we have got this subscription heritage, do start from the three-tiered approach.
We don’t allow people to buy the print edition only, that’s always part of a bundle, because what you want to do with every good subscription business and membership proposition is, you want people to use more than one element of their entitlements.
Everyone has a formula, ultimately. Spotify, back in the day, it used to be two shares and a playlist, and you’d never churn. At the Wall Street Journal, it was two product and five stories within a certain time frame, and you knew they weren’t going to churn. Everyone can work out what the formula for customer engagement is – it’s different by brand and different by product, but all of those things are true.
The importance of teams
There are lots of things I’m really bad at. I’m one of those people that gets zero joy out of working on my weaknesses… I get joy out of doubling down on the things that bring me joy and that I’m good at. I never want to be good at a spreadsheet. Shoot me now! I love having an idea, I love dreaming up things. Then I get really bored if I have to work through the steps of how we’re going to go from A-Z. I like to just get to Z.
The reason I love teams is that I don’t have to be good at those things… I always tell my team, it’s like the Avengers. They’re all brilliant, but individually, they can’t save the world. It’s only when they assemble that you can actually save the world, and not just be a green, miserable giant. The team is everything because I can just be me, and everyone can turn up as themselves, and we can all be brilliant but we can all be equally challenging, and we can be supportive.
It’s also more fun because it’s hard to do the things we’re trying to do, to turn around these businesses, to stop thinking about extended runways and to change the outcome, to build a new future for ourselves. We have to create our own luck, and you can’t do that by yourself.
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