LIFESTYLE MAGAZINES
This is one of the most popular and competitive areas of the magazine publishing market.
Lifestyle and consumer magazines are second only in terms of consumer sales to the television listings magazines (such as What's on TV and Radio Times), but the lifestyle market has many more titles competing for its readers.
On pp.111-12 we talked about 'narrowcasting': as new magazines come on to the market they are increasingly trying to narrow down the market and provide advertisers with more and more specific reader 'profiles'.
Narrowcasting – offering more specific reader profiles.
Like most newspapers the revenue which lifestyle magazines get from advertising is far more important than the income they receive from the cover price and individual sales. It is estimated that women spend £230 million a year on monthly 'glossies' and that the magazines 'earn' another £190 million from advertising.
Balance between Readership/Circulation/Advertsing
'Lifestyle' is a very broad category that can include FHM, (Gardener’s World or Woman's Realm. However, all these magazines are trying to do the same thing, using a consumerist ideology based on particular lifestyles to deliver particular groups of audiences to advertisers.
What would Marx or the Frankfurt School say?
We need to consider what the term 'lifestyle' means.
What is it that these magazines offer their readers?
On the surface they seem to offer:
· information and advice about certain types of 'lifestyle':
· what products to buy; where to buy them;
· the types of goods and services that might be available to someone leading that particular 'lifestyle'.
Lifestyle magazines often offer their readers not only advice but also a sense of identity and possibly companionship and reassurance.
What theory would best describe this?
They appear to share with their readers the problems and issues of other similar people who also read the magazine.
The magazines also appear to offer guidance and instruction on how to live a particular lifestyle as well as entertainment and escapism. The magazines also offer aspiration in a variety of different spheres, such as relationships, careers, material possessions or looks.
One of the attractions of lifestyle magazines is that they are usually a secondary media and require little effort or concentration to consume.
What do I mean by secondary?
They are designed to be 'browsed' through, with regular features signposted and articles and advertisements designed to attract the reader's attention. They carry a unique visuality – pleasing on the eye easy on the brain.
These magazines will possibly be kept until the next edition arrives and so may be left lying around a home for some time. Price demands a higher priority on possession than a newspaper.
The magazines will therefore be looked at several times by the same reader or glanced through by new readers.
Readers may have different patterns of reading magazines, perhaps when they do not want to be disturbed and can go somewhere quiet or perhaps in the mornings over a cup of coffee.
The readership of a magazine is as important its circulation.
The readership of magazines aimed particularly at one market may have a significant number of readers from another market, i.e. the men who read women's magazines.
Sometimes this is done 'secretly', as some men are reluctant to admit that they enjoy reading some of the features of women's magazines or they may only admit to reading the problem pages.
There may be an element of titillation and vicarious pleasure from gaining glimpses of other people's sex lives. Sometimes this reading may be more open, for example, the Letters Page in the July 2000 edition of Red included a contribution from a man, and some magazines have included sections aimed specifically at male readers.
ACTIVITY
Ask a selection of your peers how they 'consume' magazines.
· Do they have a particular pattern to how and when they read?
· Does it vary for different types of magazine?
Do they read magazines aimed at the opposite sex.?
· Do men 'confess' to reading women's magazines? Which ones? What, if any, particular aspects of the women's magazines do they look at?
· Do women read men's magazines? Which ones? What particular features interest them?
· Are women influenced by the articles supposedly addressed to the opposite sex?
'Lifestyle' magazines are primarily consumer magazines that aim to make a profit by 'selling' particular types of audience to advertisers.
The magazines are offering their readers literally a 'lifestyle': in other words a model on which to base their lives at this particular moment and the goods necessary to accommodate it.
In postmodern times social identity is now a far bigger social factor than class. Many people’s identity is tied up with their consumption. What the Frankfurt school refer to as psuedo-individuality or as Marcuse would say One Dimensional Man [sic]
To do this successfully, magazines need to be able to make their readers identify with the lifestyle on offer, but at the same time offer them slightly more than they may already have.
The magazines offer both guidance and aspiration: 'You, too, can be like this if only you do this/buy that', etc.
The way this works for successful magazines is to have a clear sense of the target audience, Ang's 'imaginary entity' (p.121), and to adopt an appropriate mode of address.
Ang discusses the manner in which media producers and institutions view audiences as an ‘imaginary entity’ as a mass rather than as a set of individuals. They will however, often have a ‘typical’ audience member in mind when they produce their texts.
'THE MOST FUN A GIRL CAN HAVE WITH HER CLOTHES ON!' - TEENAGE MAGAZINES
More! and J-17 are both commercially successful magazines aimed at teenage girls. They are notionally in competition with each other but in fact are both owned and published by EMAP.
They are both very carefully aimed at separate, distinctive niche markets defined by age.
This market is very competitive; and EMAP's Elan Youth group that is responsible for their teenage magazines has recently closed down two titles, Big! and Minx, because of falling sales.
They still publish Bliss, Looks and Smash Hits but are planning new Internet titles through EMAP Digital. It is estimated that 72 per cent of girls in the U K read magazines compared to 58 per cent of adult women.
ACTIVITY
Discuss with others why you think that a magazine publisher may have more than one title aimed at a particular social group. Try to find examples, using the Internet or a magazine retailer.
Although the style of contemporary popular 'teen mags' may have moved away from the photo-stories of Jackie and My Guy, much of the content deals with similar issues, albeit in a more up-to-date manner.
McRobbie (1983), writing about the ideology underpinning Jackie, noted that it socialised female adolescents into a 'feminine' culture.
[Jackie] sets up, defines and focuses exclusively on the personal, locating it as the sphere of prime importance to the teenage girl. It presents this as a totality - and by implication all else is of secondary interest to the 'modern girl'. Romance problems, fashion, beauty and pop mark out the limits of the girl's concern - other possibilities are ignored or dismissed.
As McRobbie suggests, however, it is important to question the extent to which teenage readers accept or challenge this reading.
J-17
According to J-17, 'For the coolest fashion and hottest gossip, stylish babes read J-17'. With a circulation of over 300,000 and a readership of nearly three times that, J-1 7 is the most successful of the current 'teen mags'. It is aimed at 'aspirational' females, 'mature for their years', ABCls in the 12-17 age range.
Research by J-1 7 suggests that 'appearance and image are very important' for J-J 7 readers and that they are 'the highest spenders on toiletries/cosmetics within the youth market'.
J-1 7 readers wash their hair on average 4.4 times a week and in 1998 spent £6 a month on hair care and £19.55 a week on clothes, usually bought from places like Top Shop, Tammy, Miss Selfridge and River Island. Also in 1998 they spent on average £48.48 for a pair of trainers and £30 on a new pair of Jeans.
Advertising in J-1 7 reflects this profile with an emphasis on health and beauty products, fashion and music but also quite a lot of confectionery. Articles include 'how to cope with your parents' as well as fashion tips, star profiles, show-biz gossip and horoscopes, and are all presented on high-gloss full-colour paper.
Most of J-1 7's readers are under the legal age of consent, and a major part of J-i 7's attraction is its Problem Pages, where readers can not only 'speak for themselves' but also read about problems and issues that may also feature in their own lives and that they may have difficulty in discussing with their peers or family. The mode of address is personal, friendly and intimate. It is this area of the magazine that is perhaps the most 'reassuring'1 saying to its readers 'you are not alone’ others are having similar problems and fears'. 'Typical' letters might read:
'I am not yet 16 and my boyfriend is several years older than me. We have been together for a year and been having sex for several months. He has asked me to take part in a bondage session with him and his friends. I like having sex with him but the thought of being tied up scares me. What should I do?'
'Recently I was caught by my mum snogging with my boyfriend. Now she says that she doesn't like us being alone together, and that I'm acting like a slut. But I haven't any plans for sex and I don't understand why my mum doesn't trust me.'
These types of feature have been the focus of a 'moral panic' over the last few years. There have been accusations that these magazines condone under-age sexual activity and seemingly endorse sexual promiscuity as well as offering a 'guide' to different sexual practices.
There have been calls for magazine editors to curb such sexually explicit content, although the editors and publishers have argued that they offer 'responsible' advice that their readers may otherwise not receive.
Consider issues of censorship.
More!
More! is EMAP's second most profitable title and has a circulation of around 300,000 sales per issue and a readership of 800,000 per issue. The target age of its readership is 16-24, of which 48 per cent are ABC1 and 75 per cent single.
More! describes itself as 'the biggest selling young women's magazine in the U K'. According to the editor, More! is aimed at
every up-for-it young woman, because it's all about fun, flirting and looking gorgeous. With its cheeky humour, hunky men, sex advice and red-hot celebrity gossip, More! shoots straight from the hip. And with its glamorous new look and gorgeous fashion and beauty, More! is everything a sassy young woman wants from her life in handy magazine form. It's the most fun a girl can have with her clothes on'
They claim that '1% of More! readers go out 3-4 nights in an average week. Their ideal night out is round a friend's house for a good natter and make-up session, then to the local warm-up before going to a club to check out the totty.' More! readers shop at Top Shop, River Island, Warehouse, Oasis and Miss Selfridge; '470/o are working in media, teaching, nursing and secretarial work'. Role models in 1997, when the readership was surveyed, were Anita Roddick, Gaby Roslin and Cindy Crawford.
The style and contents are similar to J-17, but the products are perhaps a little more 'upmarket' (L'Oreal rather than Cote's Puzzel) and the articles are a little more 'serious' (teenage disappearances rather than parental unfairnesses).
The title itself is quite interesting - More! More what - Sex? Fashion? Advice? The More! editorial team would probably reply 'more Fun'. What that means is suggested by the strap-line 'Eye-Popping! Pant-Busting! Bed-Busting! The sex that changed YOUR lives' on the cover of the issue of 27 January 1999 and the regular 'Position of the Fortnight' feature.
According to Taylor, magazines like More! and J-17 are offering their readers a positive representation of themselves, reassuring the girl she is not alone or unusual'.
There is a 'theme of taking control of their lives, and living for themselves'. It is also a representation that shows that teenage girls are mature, independent, sensible and trustworthy - values that perhaps many of them feel are not recognised by the 'adult' world.
Part of the mode of address is to reinforce a sense of belonging and a type of solidarity against the unfairness of the world 'out there', a world that won't let them do want they want.
According to Taylor, magazines like More! and J-17 provide a teenage girl with 'a learning experience within the privacy of her own bedroom.
Whereby she can see and understand her peers, without feeling embarrassed or ashamed. Quite simply the teenage girl can learn about herself, and grasp the meaning of everything that is happening to her.
