Everyone has a pile of old magazines lying around the house somewhere, and if you are walking past a newsstand at the mall or sitting at the dentist’s office, you are going to be tempted to get a magazine and flip through the pages. On one hand, magazines are a mechanism for providing people with current information on a wide selection of subjects on a regular basis – usually monthly, but sometimes even weekly.
However, the term magazine was initially utilized to indicate that a storehouse for grain or gunpowder, so how did the word come to be associated with a periodical publication? The first periodical to use the term magazine in its name was launched in London by Edward Cave in 1731. Cave used the phrase magazine in the title of his gentleman’s Magazine’ to indicate that this new novel was a storehouse of information, providing all of the information that a civilized person needed to be able to keep current on what was happening in the world. Cave’s magazine was tremendously successful, and in a few years, many spin-off books started to appear in London and in America.
Magazines have gone through an intricate evolution through the years, and it’s instructive to think about publications as belonging to one of three different categories: news, and customer. Trade magazines are designed to alert the members of a particular professional or occupational group, of items of particular interest to them. Individuals and businesses buy subscriptions to trade magazines, and the majority of the content is written by and for people in the trade – for example, accountants or college teachers.
These magazines are usually unavailable to the general public, and any advertisements that they could contain (usually not much) will be directed at members of the trade. News magazines, which in the case of books like’Time’ or’The Economist’ are usually printed weekly, are directed at a wide readership. These magazines are designed to offer a single source through which readers can catch up on news, current events, and hot topics.
They can be found in bookstores, at newsstands, in addition to by subscription, and the average quantity of advertising that they feature is quite diverse with respect to products displayed and rather general concerning the approach is taken in the advertisements. The huge majority of contemporary magazines fall in the consumer group, and these magazines are directed at highly specific segments of the populace, whether dog-lovers, gardeners, brides-to-be, or individuals who Consumer magazines usually have a variety of small articles that deal with topics of interest to the targeted group, but in most cases, the majority of available space is In customer magazines, advertisers have the chance to pitch well-defined mixes of goods, in a way that speaks directly to the targeted group.
For the marketer, it follows they are getting maximum penetration with their message, and for publishers, this means they can depend on the advertisers to make the majority of With customer magazines, real sales of the magazine are a secondary consideration. What matters is that prospective advertisers believe that, through magazines, information about their products is becoming into the hands of those men and women who are most likely to
