Bridging the gap between newspapers and the market

Anna Serner, the CEO Tidnings Utgivarna, The Swedish Newspaper Publishers’ Association spoke today during the INMA / OPA Outlook 2010 conference about how important it is for newspapers to innovate within their own brands and in their relationship with their readers/consumers .
There is a market out there willing to pay for bottled water. Even in countries where the tap water is both free and drinkable. The consumers and advertisers are used to paying for the brands they trust. Yet the trustworthy business of newspapers cannot find its way to a similarly profitable business model in the digital market place.

The newsmedia publishers should be able to answer two questions: do they know the market, and who they are waiting for. They have to know the market, know the reader, and then give him what he wants.

Younger generations are the ones who are growing now in times, when everybody is talking about the death of newspapers. According to the Swedish Newspaper Publishers’ Association’s latest research in Sweden:

• 68,5% absolutely want a free subscription.
• 53% believe that the paper will exist in 50 years
• 16% believe that the paper is the most important media.

Anna Serner suggested that young people today have three features publishers should focus on mostly:  style conscience, individualism and experience orientation. Therefore newsmedia companies should:
1. Concentrate on style. As a great example, the speaker showed two different way of selling books online. One online bookstore does it this way:

Google does it differently:

Google does a lot of things publishers may not like, but there’s always chance to learn from Google’s mistakes. All pages do not necessarily have to look the same. Innovation and creativity are the keys.

2. Individualize. Many companies do it already. Time is experimenting with individual weekly, Niiu in Germany is trying to publish personalised daily. It is important for a newspaper to represent the same features as the reader has.

3. Experience. Maybe the solution is to look into other markets and study how the successful consumer brands act? Anna Serner showed the example of award winning marketing campaign of Diesel, that 2 years ago through viral advertising, integration with web 2.0, adaptation of the user generated content, dialogue and branded content, created an incredible buzz around its brand. It became one of top 10 YouTube videos, gained almost 35.000 new google search results within 24 hours. Below is the movie telling more about this action:

Will newsmedia companies dare?

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