
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 22, 1993                   TAG: 9307220039
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SANGER NEWSDAY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MAGAZINES TRY A NEW TACTIC - MARKED-DOWN PRICES

Two women's magazines that rely heavily on sales in supermarkets are borrowing marketing tactics from the grocery aisles.

When Family Circle cut its cover price to 99 cents from $1.25 in January, its aim was to stress value by adopting "everyday low pricing," just like Procter & Gamble did with detergents.

Woman's Day followed by placing 25-cents-off coupons in newspapers' Sunday supplements.

While magazines have tested coupons and lower prices to sell subscriptions for years, using those promotions to push single-copy sales is fairly new and becoming more prevalent, said James Guthrie, executive vice president of marketing development for the Magazine Publishers of America.

Family Circle and Woman's Day are two of the so-called Seven Sisters, women's magazines that boast some of the largest circulation and oldest titles. They focus on food, fashion, health, decorating and celebrity interviews, and trumpet headlines such as "Great Hair Fixes" and "Healthy! Delicious! No-Meat Cookbook."

Some of the others in the group - McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, Redbook and Good Housekeeping - are testing other supermarket-related promotions.

"Today's consumer is much more concerned with value and pricing than they have been in the last decade," Guthrie said, and that goes for magazines as well as margarine.

Women's magazines did well last year and have performed better than average in 1993 because the big advertising categories they draw from - toiletries and cosmetics, food and drugs and remedies - have increased spending.

Woman's Day, with 4.8 million circulation, saw ad pages jump 22 percent last year with a 31 percent gain in revenue. Through March, ad pages climbed 20 percent and revenues 31 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Better Homes and Gardens registered a 19-percent increase in ad pages through March and McCall's revenues skyrocketed 25 percent. Ad revenue at Family Circle, the nation's seventh-largest mass circulation magazine, climbed 14 percent through March.

Family Circle lowered the newsstand price after tests showed it boosted circulation by "several hundred thousand" copies, said Kenneth A. Chester, senior vice president of circulation for The New York Times Co. Women's Magazines. Consumers can't miss the discount: On the cover's upper right hand corner, $1.25 is crossed out and some issues say "On Sale."

"Family Circle is a magazine for readers that care about price value," publisher Valerie Salembier said. But she stresses that the price wasn't lowered, it was simply "marked down," which gives the magazine "the freedom to bring it back up." Family Circle gets about 55 percent of its 5.3 million circulation from newsstands, and of that, 85 percent are sold in supermarkets.

Woman's Day also costs 99 cents, but with a coupon it's a mere 74 cents, the cheapest of the group.

by CNB