Thinking Big

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Thinking Big The Economist launches a social media campaign and e-book in an attempt to rejuvenate its once-stodgy image

By Christine Birkner | Staff Writer

 cbirkner@ama.org Goal

Throughout its history, The Economist has been known for its intense, high-level and in-depth coverage of business, politics and world news, and until recently, the publication had marketed itself as such. For 22 years, the newsweekly, published by London-based parent company Economist Newspaper Ltd., communicated its serious brand identity through an intellectually oriented global print ad campaign called “White Out of Red,” featuring messages such as, “Would you like to sit next to you at dinner?” and: “Somebody

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mentions Jordan. You think of a Middle Eastern country with a 3.3% growth rate.”

In 2009, The Economist’s marketing team thought that it was time to shake things up in an attempt to appeal to a broader reader base.

“The ‘White Out of Red’ campaign was a fantastic success, [but] it focused our image so narrowly as being for high-end, super-smart banker types. We needed something that would break out and make the marketplace realize that we were not just about economics and finance,” says Susan Clark, the publication’s group

marketing director and managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “We’re called The Economist and that causes problems for the marketing team because it makes people think we’re a magazine for economists, that we’re all about economics, rather than what we are, a weekly news and business publication.”

Action

In January 2009, The Economist launched “Thinking Spaces,” a website geared toward European readers that encouraged them to submit photos and descriptions of the

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“One of the things that unites our readers is that they’re all passionate readers. They’ll read anything. They’ll read the back of a cereal box if they have nothing else to read. By showing places where they go to read and to think, we could get the message across that we attract really interesting and curious people.”

Susan Clark, Economist Newspaper Ltd.

places that they like to go to read and think. “One of the ways we try to get the point across that we’re not just about economics is to showcase the breadth of our coverage. We decided the best way to do that was to showcase the diversity of our readership by showing the places they like to read. Our research shows us … that one of the things that unites our readers is that they’re all passionate readers. They’ll read anything. They’ll read the back of a cereal box if they have nothing else to read. By showing places where they go to read and to think, we could get the message across that we attract really interesting and curious people,” Clark says.

The “Thinking Spaces” submissions showcased a wide variety of readers’ contemplative spots, from a walking path along Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, to a

city square in Peru, to a village in India, with descriptions on why each space inspired that particular reader.

In 2010, the campaign expanded to include an app and a Facebook page, and in May 2012, The Economist launched a “Thinking Spaces” e-book, a print version of which was unveiled at a photography show in Hamburg, Germany. “We kept thinking: We’re going to have to move on to a different campaign. It must’ve hit its peak. But we saw that people are still uploading images and signing on as [Facebook] fans. What started as a narrow, Internet-only campaign really took on legs,” Clark says.

Results

Over the course of the campaign, the “Thinking Spaces” Facebook page received 49,000 “likes,” more than doubling the marketing team’s goal of 20,000, and the

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magazine saw a 1% increase in circulation in continental Europe, according to Clark.

The campaign resonated with women and younger readers, in particular, Clark says. “Our traditional readership tends to be skewed toward men, yet 47% of the ‘Thinking Spaces’ Facebook fans are women. Seventy percent are under 35 years old and our average readership of The Economist is 44 years old,” Clark says.

“The evidence shows how much we liked it because we kept doing different versions of it over the course of a couple of years.

We know from the kinds of people who originally signed on to show off their thinking spaces, we know by the growth of our circulation in Europe during the course of this, especially in markets where we had many of the uploads, that it resonated with the audience. We see in the data that it really reached its objective.”

Michael Miller, CMO of Hyper Marketing Inc., a Chicago-based agency specializing in digital marketing, says that the campaign did well in its attempts to connect with new audiences. “It did a great job at opening the brand up, and it created a dialogue with their customers and with new readership. The Economist really needed to turn on to that emotional side and they did. It’s a learning course for all publishing companies today.” m

Brand

The Economist Headquarters

London Campaign Timeline

January 2009-May 2012 Results

49,000 Facebook “likes”; 1% increase in circulation in continental Europe

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