Donald Kummerfeld, President & CEO, International Federation of Periodical Press

Donald Kummerfeld (also known as Don) is currently Chairman of Kummerfeld Associates Inc, a consulting and investment-banking firm in New York, which he founded in 1985. Kummerfeld has extensive publishing experience. From 1987 to 1999 he served as President and CEO of the Magazine Publishers of America, the US trade association for consumer magazines and today is the President and CEO and International Federation of Periodical Press (FIPP).

The FIPP is looking at India closely now and Don speaks more on what he thinks is the way forward for magazine publishers in India in this interview with exchange4media's Noor Fathima Warsia.

Q. Why do you think there aren’t any successful websites in India?

You will have some soon. I believe the B2B space is already taking off, it is easier on B2B because business consumers are ready to pay, they need the information. It is not like the mass consumers who would pay for branded websites only if it really interests them. That said, Indian editors are just as innovative and creative as editors are anywhere else in the world. I am sure they will rise to this editorial challenge.

The most important one has been digital - some people were surprised with the resurgence of the Internet. We went through the period in 1990s called 'digital 1.0' and there was disappointment because people put their content on the web and no one came to read it. Gradually, they went back to their concentration on print.

Now with broadband and the ability to put not just text, but also pictures and other visuals on the Internet, and the other technological changes in the last 10 years, the proportion of time that consumers are putting on the Internet came as a surprise to publishers. And by now, most people in of the world recognise that these trends will not be reversed - there won't be another burnout. The digital medium is new and is here to stay, and people will spend more time on it.

Consumer tastes today are changing rapidly. It used to take 10 years for changes to take place and for magazine to respond to them, but we have a whole new category of magazines today and before you know, the consumer really wants something different. Editors have to be very alert for the changes in interest because, let's face it, consumer loyalty is declining. They are being far 'pickier' - they want lots of choices and they make these choices, and it is not necessary that they are making the same choices as they did last year. We have to editorially be quicker and sensitive.

Also, the consumer is becoming ambitious. They want their needs to be answered when they want it and they know they will get it, if not from one player, then from the others.

An advantage magazines have here is that when people are looking at websites, they would rather go to a branded website, where they know the brand and trust it. The very overwhelming amount of websites available is making branded websites more valuable, so there is a lot we can do and if we don't take advantage of that, we are being foolish. In all fairness, it's not easy to have a successful website. It usually takes five years, no one can do it overnight, but we have to open our minds. From the kind of people we hire, who understand the digital medium, to the kinds of experiments we are ready to undertake. We can't be doing the same old thing!

Ideally, everyone would like to have a 100 per cent subscription - you know everything about your consumers then and you have an average of 300 different points of information about that person - income, age, how many people in the family, you know who your customers are and what their profile is. No one in the world is selling advertising like the US magazine publishers are because of this factor. While in India, you are lucky to have a low cost postal system, what you don't have is a good database, you may not be getting to 100 per cent or 80 per cent or even lesser of a relevant target.

Newsstand sales are difficult anywhere in the world because there are more titles than there is space and there is a lot of mucky business that goes on display. Inherently, newsstands are the wrong way to distribute magazines. What should be good here is the retail boom. Supermarkets have more space - 60 per cent of magazine sales today in America are coming from supermarkets, so we can improve a single property distribution. People don't like to buy magazines without opening it, and so we need large national wholesales and we are moving in that direction too. We need a more efficient system of targeting readers here until you can build up subscription and the bigger companies are taking interest in these problems. But this is a worldwide problem.

Just because digital needs attention it doesn't mean that print doesn't - print needs the same amount of focus. We have to get into brand extensions today as we are growing into something bigger than anything in the past. You can see that magazines are adding more to the main magazine. Around the world, the reason why there are such initiatives of specials and supplements is because the consumer is impatient, he doesn't want the same thing. So, we are creating the illusion of doing something new - even though we are really doing the same thing. The whole syndrome of 'there is something different about this issue and so you should buy it', though present, is low today.

We represent magazine all over the world. We want to represent your industry as fairly and accurately as the rest of the world and our job is to make sure that we promote India at the global level and people understand what the opportunity and difficulties in India are. I've been here eight times in the last five years talking to people and encouraging people to join in and I'm very optimistic on what FIPP can do for India.

From the languages. Today, high quality magazines are in English because that is where the advertiser is. Growth in the future will come from regional languages and their role already is significant. Advertisers believe that consumers in these markets have purchasing power and there are no artificial barriers here. Second is promotion and the third is availability.

I think the bigger companies have the capacity to do it, but the smaller ones do not. To use a ridiculous example, if you don't promote a movie, you don't get audience. The point is how many of us are putting that kind of money in promoting it. This is not an Indian problem, the problem exists everywhere in the world. Promotions are expensive. I think we have to recognise that just putting the magazine out there doesn't mean that people know about it.

Bounce is when there is drastic change in one year. Everyone knows that people don't change their reading habits by 40 per cent in one year - there is something wrong when research data shows that and that is bounce. At the same time, no one can eliminate bounce because no one can really have large enough survey to get accurate results. But when you average out data, this problem is solved. By averaging, I mean you should average out five years data.

Then at the same time, many magazines have a fairly high percentage of subscription and in addition, when you do internal research using the right methodology - that does give you a much better idea than relying on national surveys.

Yes, but you have to see the whole picture - people will buy more copies per family today in comparison to yesterday. So, that doesn't make it any less valuable to advertisers and advertising rates are increasing. If magazines can explain what these trends mean to advertisers, they don't have much to worry about. There are some advantages that come only from magazines - magazine average gets far higher prices and when you pay, you get what you pay for. So, if you are doing it right, you put a price in your magazine and you will get it.

One of the brand new things on the digital front today is the reliance on search engines to navigate and find the information that one wants to read, we didn't have search engines back in the 90s. Nobody had predicted a Google and what caused these search engines to come and grow the way they have. We all have to come to terms with that. Second, somewhere these changes have made it possible to get advertisers. Now, in that lies a great opportunity to make the websites profitable. The increase in magazine branded websites has led to this strength to the digital space today.

Positioning is very important, but the risk is that the reader also has to make the decision whether they have to buy or not. When you take a position, you are trying to predict audience response - if you are right, good… or else...

Prices are usually dependant on the leaders in this category, but yes, clutter can be a problem, but that is something that the industry should target together.