Manufacturning Loses 23 Trade Mags. Now What?
Posted on | April 21, 2010 | No Comments
Manufacturers who’ve been counting on advertising in trade journals have just had their promotional options cut significantly. Yesterday Reed Business Information announced it was shutting down 23 magazines. That’s in addition to eight titles it sold previously to Sandow Media and two others (Library Journal and School Library Journal) sold to Media Source Inc.
The company blamed declining revenues and the economy, but read the comments and you get a different story that involves an out-of-date web strategy!
Said one former employee: “The company destroyed a viable publishing operation with… <among other things>… an ill-timed enormous investment in an Internet platform that was already a relic from at the time it was purchased in 1999, and an Internet strategy that failed to acknowledge the depth and breadth of the new medium and instead tried to fit all of the publications into a Soviet-styled peg. “
Offers another: “…the most egregious error was the company’s amazing ability to latch onto three-year-old web strategies and act as if they were brand new. Because of this RBI was behind the curve in site design, use of multimedia, electronic newsletters…. we were told that the sites would become profitable if we simply posted more blogs and podcasts.”
Surely there were other factors at play. The publishing world has been struck across the board with declining revenues because of the rise of the Internet. But, lesson to manufacturers and the rest of us: A bad emarketing and website strategy apparently can do more harm than good. Might be time to take a hard look at your emarketing efforts.
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