Print proliferation

PUBLICATIONS: India's magazines and newspapers market has words pouring out from almost all directions. Can this frenzy last?

The seventh year into an electronic millennium, and the publication market in India is in frenzy. The Outlook Group is set to launch a full-fledged business magazine (it already has an investment fortnightly) to compete against Business Today, Business India and BusinessWorld, which would bring the tally in this readership market to four. Even American business readers are not quite so spoilt for choice.

But then, that's India. The business newspaper market is not missing out on any of the buzz either, with HT Media having confirmed the appointment of Raju Narisetti as the head of editorial for its forthcoming business daily. Counting this, the number of financial/business dailies looking for Indian readership goes up to five.

What's happening? According to Maheshwar Peri, president and publisher, Outlook Group, it's a function of the global interest in the Indian market as a hot business prospect. "When foreign companies are investing billions of dollars in India," he elaborates, "they want that awareness to be created "" and their intentions made public. And this is what we are trying to get in our new magazine, Outlook Business."

But there exist publications that do this, don't they? Not to his target reader's satisfaction, says Peri, who claims to have spotted several holes in existing business magazines that he could plug: the global context of business events, for instance. And then there's analysis: Outlook Business proposes to have teams of analysts working on all its reports and stories.

There's more from the group too. With the launch of Marie Claire in June, Outlook will become an eight-magazine strong company, and, if Peri is to be believed, expect five-six more magazines by 2007.

Outlook's main rival publishing house, Living Media, is not sitting twiddling its thumbs either. Though Ashish Bagga, publishing director, India Today Group, does not want to disclose all his cards, he lets on that some new magazines are in the works. "We already have add-on magazines like Aspire, Spice and Simply (to cater to different geographies), and we have brought out Men's Health, but we are talking to international players for possible tie-ups in international titles," says Bagga.

Publishing circles are abuzz with expectations of a consumer product magazine from Living Media, but Bagga won't breathe a word of it "" except to assert that there is indeed viable space in this niche. "So much is happening in the consumer products segment "" new gizmos, televisions, music systems, telephone sets etcetera," he says, sounding bullish.

Publishers are not only identifying new zones of interest, but also leveraging their original core competence to engage a wider span of their reader's attention.

The Indian Express Group, for example, is planning several magazines for which it has also hired a bunch of senior journalists. "It's difficult to give a time frame to when these magazines will be out, but these will be in areas where we can leverage the Express Group's strengths like investigative and indepth journalism," says Shekhar Gupta, editor-in-chief, Indian Express, and group CEO. "While one or two will be in existing areas," he adds, "the rest will be in new areas."

The group already has some niche magazines, Express Computers and Express Pharma among them, and is committed to a Rs 120-crore upgradation of its printing facilities across India "" in line for an IPO later this year.

Meanwhile, the action in the market's lifestyle segment is not showing any signs of weariness yet. Living Media's Cosmopolitan has enlarged its appeal "" just in time, as it appears, to pose an entry barrier to the Indian edition of Marie Claire, which will have some 70 per cent Indian content; and, according to Peri, will slot itself between Cosmopolitan ("a relationship magazine" in Peri's description) and the palindromic title Elle ("fashion & design"). The differentiator: heart-rending content, to go with all the regular stuff.

As a head-turner, though, the magazine trying its damnedest is Maxim, which aims for male readership with its soft-raunch content. Piyush Sharma, CEO and associate publisher, Maxim India, claims that the Indian edition of this UK magazine has had a spectacular launch. "Maxim got the advantage of entering a virgin market, and also a strong marketing network that Media TransAsia (which brings out Maxim here) has," says Sharma.

As for the fracas over film star Khushboo and the trampling of Indian cultural sensitivities, the company claims to have made amends by withdrawing the offensive column.

The bigger question, however, is whether the Indian market is ready for all this frenetic action in the print media business. After all, attention is being stolen furiously away by other options too, the Internet included.

No matter, say media analysts. So long as the economy is in boom, and readership potential far from exhausted, publications will prosper. Advertising, currently at barely 0.5 per cent of GDP in India (the US is over 1 per cent), is likely to start growing proportionally faster than GDP as competitive forces take firmer charge of the market's dynamics.

There's already much money sloshing around. Sharma, for instance, boasts almost one third of the Maxim's 150 pages are ads. The entry of Playboy, which may find India a wee bit more receptive to its fare than Indonesia, could expand this segment further "" though Sharma wants Maxim positioned as a "lifestyle" spread as its central focus. "We are in two different segments," avers Sharma.

What about other male magazines? "The market is growing, and so is readership for men's magazines, so there is enough scope for all of us to co-exist," says N Radhakrishnan, publisher & editor, Man's World. Further, according to Radhakrishnan, pricing strategies, gloss, content or international titles are not things that can distract the loyal reader. Outlook Group's Peri is also convinced that this is a value game, not a razzmatazz one "" which would've been lost to the glitz of TV in any case.

Once quality levels have been scaled, the battle moves to ease-of-access. According to Peri, the pricing strategy is therefore not to be overlooked.

Outlook Group's marketing of Newsweek in India, for example, expects to give Time a hard time on price. "We have slashed Newsweek's price by almost a third: from Rs 80 we have brought down the subscription price to Rs 25, and those on news-stands to Rs 50," says Peri.

Bagga is unimpressed. "Time, with its loyal set of readers, will never lose out to Newsweek just because the latter's price has been slashed. Time sells at Rs 80." Bagga would rather rely on strong marketing. "Five years back, we changed our strategy for Business Today from a higher-price subscription-driven one, to a lower-price newsstand-driven model, which saw its circulation rise by 35-40 per cent," he says.

On the other hand, he says, India Today lost no readers on upping its price to Rs 20 eight months ago. Now even Outlook is for Rs 20.

In all, the English market seems overwrought with the printed word. Won't there be cop-outs? What if there's a downturn? Well, there could be, say the combatants. Peri does not rule out a bout of M&A activity to reverse the trend of print proliferation.

While that highly sought-after creature called "the reader" may relish being spoilt for choice, there's only so many words on paper that can command focal attention.