 Media Management Center MediaInfoCenter McCormick Fellows Kellogg School of Management Medill |
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When
the Impact study surveyed 37,000 consumers across the United States
about their local newspapers, it found many ways for newspapers to increase
readership. Almost every kind of improvement in service, editorial quality,
brand perception and advertising quality has the potential to increase
customer satisfaction and readership.
But the real challenge isn't coming up with areas to improve, but in prioritizing improvements to make the most of limited resources. If you can't do everything, how do you decide what's most important? The Readership Institute decided to prioritize opportunities by their potential to get people to actually read the newspaper more. Where will improvements motivate people to spend more time with the newspaper and read more sections more often? These ratings are called opportunity scores. Not surprisingly, some opportunities have more potential than others. Automotive coverage, for example, has a lower opportunity score than business coverage. In literal terms, this says that increasing satisfaction with business coverage is more likely to increase readership than increasing satisfaction with automotive coverage. If you think about it, it makes sense. Even if most newspapers offered encyclopedic automotive coverage written by world-renown experts, most readers would still only spend a few minutes each day reading it. We found that advertising content has great potential to increase readership. This is not the same as saying that people buy newspapers to read the advertisements - a truth that the newspaper industry has known for a long time. We found that readers actually spend more time with the newspaper and read more sections when they found interesting advertising content. In fact, editorial content was better-read when the newspaper also had quality advertising content. We found these opportunity scores to be remarkably consistent across U.S. newspapers. Regardless of circulation size or market circumstance, the relative rankings of each opportunity remain the same. This consistency means that any newspaper can implement these changes with confidence that the instructions apply to it. The opportunity scores themselves have no inherent meaning -- they are relative scores used to rank areas. Differences of three to four points in an opportunity score also aren't meaningful. Focus on the overall rank of opportunities and differences of more than five points. Editorial Content
* "Easy to Read" is both a brand perception and an editorial content quality. See our Understanding and Improving "Easy to Read" Content page for more information. Advertising Content
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©2010 Readership
Institute • 304 Fisk Hall • Northwestern
University • 1845 Sheridan
Road • Evanston, IL 60208-2110 |
