Book Magazine is 50% owned by Barnes & Noble and has an astounding 1.3 million circulation. But the Philadelphia Inquirer reports its publishers are quick to claim the magazine “is no marketing tool.”

Quote:

If you sign up for (the B & N) Readers’ Advantage, you get Book automatically in the mail. Of the $25 annual fee, $10 goes to Book for a one-year subscription (ordinarily $14.95). Thanks to the RA program, Book is already bigger than the New Yorker (857,495) and way ahead of the New York Review of Books (121,489).

When asked about B & N’s involvement, publisher Mark Gleason responds:

“We’re an independent magazine” he says. B & N simply thinks it’s “a great magazine” that interests the company’s customers: “To their credit, they recognize that the magazine is only of the highest value to readers if it’s got an independent editorial voice.”

My take: Book is a customer magazine, as the British call it. That doesn’t make it a house organ for B&N nor does it make it less of a quality publication with an independent voice for its readers. In the UK, the highest circulation magazines (and some of the most popular) are sponsored by corporations for their customers in much the same way as Book Magazine is distributed. In the end, the customer will determine if Book is a quality, worthwhile publication…not those in the magazine publishing world who want to de-value it because it is successful.

How can I declare it successful, you ask?

Well, today in the New York Times, the report of Barnes & Noble’s changing of the guard, includes this information:

To attract and keep customers, Barnes & Noble has created a membership program providing steeper discounts to heavy buyers, but that has been unexpectedly popular and has recently cramped the company’s profits.

So, put the two stories together and you discover B & N has started a relationship marketing program that targets its most valuable customers; customers willing to pay $25 a year to be a member. In addition to offering these highly-valued customers a discount, it sends them a magazine about a topic they obviously enjoy and what happens? They buy even more books…more books than anyone expected.

It’s a magazine loved by Barnes and Noble’s best customers who buy books they read about in it. Call it what you want, it doesn’t matter. It works for all involved. Except, maybe, the New York Review of Books.

Anyway, aren’t all advertising-supported magazines marketing tools?

Fairfield Research, a media research company, has released summaries of recent studies they’ve conducted regarding business-to-business media. Here are pointers to each of them.

1. The Internet business-to-business media audience has reached 56.5 million who spend an average of 45 minutes daily on b2b sites.

Quote:

While the b2b, on-line audience spends, on average, 140 minutes (2.33 hours) per day on-line–35% of that time–49 minutes, is spent on B2B sites every day. The remaining 65% of their time spent on-line include reading and sending email as well as personal, non-business activities.

2. Workers find trade and business publications more valuable (43% found valuable) than business-to-business web sites (35% ) or trade shows (40%).

Quote:

Higher income workers found all three media information sources to be more valuable than the average worker. Sixty-two percent (62%) of those workers with incomes over $75,000 found trade and business publications to be valuable to them by providing information that helped them in their job. Likewise, these high-income workers found b2b web sites and trade shows significantly more valuable than the average worker.

3. While the actual number of American workers reading business media is down 3%, they are spending more time with it and being exposed longer to advertising within it.

Quote:

In 2000 business people were exposed to advertising in business publications on a national basis for 46.5 million hours per day. In 2001 American workers were exposed to advertising for 56.3 million hours each day.

Last fall, Yankelovich-Harris conducted similar research for the business-to-business media trade group American Business Media. Here is a link to a PDF of the summary of those results.

Advertising Age reports today that, you won’t believe this, there’s more “clutter” on TV these days. Their definition of clutter: “non-programming content, including national and local ads, public service announcements and other promotions.”

Teddy bomb?

The FBI today issued an alert for a man of who made a “suspicious transaction” at an LA-area Wal-mart recently.

Quote:

The FBI said a clean-shaven male, possibly of Middle Eastern descent, purchased nine Valentine teddy bears, 20 inches tall, and 14 canisters of propane, 9 inches tall, small enough to fit inside the teddy bears. The man also bought 12 packets of BBs — small, round projectiles usually fired from air guns.

Is this a war on terror story, or a marketing and technology one? Some questions it raises for me are:

1. Was it a cashier who first became alarmed, or did it get kicked out from the ongoing analysis of the
legendary amount of data Wal-Mart collects?

2. If it was the analysis of data, does this mean Wal-Mart tracks every customer’s purchase while videotaping them on a security camera and, if the customer uses a credit card, tracking them more closely than even Comcast did its Internet subscribers.

As much as I encourage companies to use data to better communicate with their customers, I fear positive use of such data will be tarnished if people begin to think companies are tracking their purchases to look for questionable patterns of behavior. For instance, Salon reports that government agencies are increasingly demanding bookstores reveal customer book purchasing records. (Wonder if that is known by the Vanderbilt student I was standing behind Sunday at the Barnes & Noble checkout counter who was asking if they had a book regarding marijuana laws.)

I’m no privacy-conspiracy nut and I support the FBI doing what it can to track down potential terrorists, but the benefits of database-enriched marketing (personalization, for instance) are threatened if such data is perceived by consumers as something that is freely shared between Uncle Sam and Sams Club.