Jane & Marie Claire Shift Focus

[kimair]

from the nytimes

TO the untrained eye, women's magazines often tend to look alike: one colorful headline after another dispensing relationship tips and fashion dictums.

But a closer look reveals a carefully bisected market that offers teenage girls titles like Seventeen and ElleGirl, while 30-somethings have more grown-up magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

Often left out of the mix are smart 20-something readers: the consumers that Brandon Holley, the new editor in chief of Jane, wants to lure to her newly revamped magazine.

Ms. Holley, who succeeded the magazine's founder, Jane Pratt, as editor in chief in August, says that Jane has always attracted a 20-something readership — but that its content sometimes sends mixed messages. Despite Jane's median reader age of 28, Ms. Holley said, the magazine put the actress Meg Ryan, who is in her 40's, on its cover in 2004.
"So I said, if we're 28, we're really going to be 28," Ms. Holley said. "No more Meg Ryan."
Instead, the March issue of Jane — Ms. Holley's first official issue since she took over the job from Ms. Pratt — features the younger actress Kate Beckinsale on the cover. A poll on the magazine's Web site asks readers to write about "the high (and low) points of being in your 20's, like still having a fabulous metabolism and being wrinkle-free."

Condé Nast is trying to prop up Jane, which faces the special challenge of thriving without Ms. Pratt, its founder and namesake. Advertising has gone down: from 2004 to 2005, its advertising pages declined 8 percent. (At Marie Claire, another magazine with 20-something appeal, ad pages fell 9 percent in the same period.)

Condé Nast, a unit of Advance Publications, has employed the advertising agency Heat, its agency of record, to create a marketing campaign reintroducing the magazine under Ms. Holley's watch. Beginning Feb. 17, Jane ads will be plastered on dozens of telephone kiosks in New York; 150,000 coffee sleeves on college campuses nationwide; radio commercials in 6,000 drugstores; and on plasma televisions in malls and airports.

Condé Nast is also venturing into unfamiliar territory with plans to enhance the Jane Web site, janemag.com, with video clips of cover shoots, interviews and other behind-the-scenes looks at how Jane is produced. (Web sites for most Condé Nast magazines serve mainly as subscription sign-up forms.)

Jane is starting to go after the so-called millennials, or consumers born from 1980 to 2000. By 2010, millennials will be a bigger group than baby boomers or Gen-X'ers, a fact not lost on executives at Jane.

"The millennials are totally different from the Gen-X'ers," said Carlos Demadrid, the vice president and publisher at Jane. "Because they're not anti-establishment, they haven't made a lot of noise. But they're big consumers. They're the children of baby boomers so they like to buy and they like labels."

Marie Claire, owned by Hearst, is also trying to carve out a part of that market. Next week, the magazine will introduce its first branding campaign — tagged "More than a pretty face" — to attract female readers who are both young and serious-minded. The ads, which were created by the agency Berlin Cameron United in New York, part of the WPP Group, are scheduled to appear in trade publications like Advertising Age and Women's Wear Daily.

The tagline demonstrates the more serious tone that Marie Claire is adopting. Lesley Jane Seymour, the editor in chief, said the magazine's average readers were in their mid-20's, but more interested in world events than 20-somethings before them. (The March issue features a profile of a 32-year-old talk show host and human rights advocate in Kenya.)

"I think what we strive to do every month editorially is address the needs of affluent urban women who do not want to live their lives with a blind eye to the world," said Susan D. Plagemann, the vice president and publisher of Marie Claire. "That's not to say that our reader is planning to quit her job and join the Peace Corps."

Ms. Seymour said Marie Claire's average reader, a woman in her mid-20's, wants more than the standard shopping and beauty features that make up most of the content in women's magazines.

"We're not just the whipped cream, we're the whole meal," she said. "And I think women in their 20's are interested in the whole meal."
Jane. meanwhile, is taking a slightly more earnest editorial shift under Ms. Holley. The magazine was founded in September 1997 as a more jaded and cynical alternative to magazines like Cosmopolitan, which has articles with titles like "How to Have 'The Talk' With Him" and "How to Turn Him On in 10 Words or Less".

But now Ms. Holley wants to get away from the tone that helped set Jane apart from the Cosmos and Glamours of the magazine world.
"I think the readers and the editors are looking to lighten things up a bit," Ms. Holley said. "There's a sense of humor we can have without all of the snarkiness. That's something we can shed."

 

[kimair]

more on jane's repositioning, from wwd:

New editors taking over existing magazines have a safety net of sorts: the ability to blame their predecessors for the parts of the magazine that don't quite work. As of the March issue of Jane, on sale Feb. 21, Brandon Holley will be working without a net. It's the official relaunch issue for Holley, who replaced founding editor in chief Jane Pratt last August. With actress Kate Beckinsale on the cover, the issue showcases a new look, a variety of new sections and features and a substantially different approach to fashion.

The new approach, said Holley, is inspired by a change in the way Jane's target readers regard fashion: They're no longer embarrassed to care about it, as many were eight years ago, when Jane was new and the grunge ethic had yet to run its course. "Fashion has become less of a stigma," she said Thursday. "A twentysomething doesn't have to feel like a sellout for really wanting the Dior bag. A Jane girl can wear Marc Jacobs shoes and still be irreverent." (Jacobs, as it happens, is profiled in the March issue.)

Thus, there's a marked increase in the number of Jane's fashion pages, from 28 an issue to between 36 and 40 going forward. The tone of the fashion photography also has shifted, away from melodrama and toward modern, upbeat layouts. "There was an element of darkness and moodiness before," said Holley. "It felt like there was a disconnect between the girl in the fashion well and the rest of the book."

The front-of-book fashion pages likewise are changed, with more dynamic product spreads and new offerings such as "The Rack," in which rock chicks style themselves from a given selection of clothes. The crossover between music and style is a running theme, in fact, popping up in several places in the new Jane. "Music and fashion are really intertwined for this woman," Holley said. "Our girl is a lot like her iPod."

 

[peacelover142002]

really interesting. thanks for sharing. i have faith in brandon holley; she did an excellent job at ellegirl. i'm also interested in marie claire, which imo is much better than its rival, cosmo.

and i'm a millenial!!