Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Des Moines-based Meredith, best known for Better Homes and Gardens, has discovered the secret to keeping magazines profitable...

Meredith has profited from a few key strategies. They are experts at repurposing their content across multiple platforms (magazines, books, websites, mobile devices, tablets, etc.) and aggressively look beyond advertising and circulation for revenue. In print, they stay as far away from the news as possible. They are particularly successful at licensing their magazine titles’ names to major national businesses selling branded products; they also run their own marketing agency.

Meredith hasn’t been immune to the forces battering the industry. But over the past decade, by strategically tweaking their portfolio, they’ve managed to maintain steady profits and reliable margins year after year in spite of the turbulence. (Lacy declined to comment.)

In February, Meredith published one of its signature editorial products—a “bookazine” called Chicken Dinners. It was flush with ads, co-branded under the Better Homes and Gardens imprimatur, and sold with no expiration date. In theory, it could live on a newsstand—or a coffee table or a kitchen counter—for many months. “Chicken Dinners is Chicken Dinners whether you buy it in May, June, or July,” says Samir Husni, the director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi. Some 88 years after Harold Ross launched The New Yorker with the pitch that it was “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque,” Iowa is turning into a surprising seat of power....