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Introducing memberships to Hearst’s iconic magazine portfolio: “There’s no one-size-fits-all,” says Katie Vanneck Smith

Hearst UK CEO Katie Vanneck Smith talks about communicating membership benefits, putting brands at the heart of the proposition and the importance of publishing teams in making magazine memberships successful.

You know the difference between a subscription and a membership, right?

• Subscriptions are transactional. Memberships are emotional.

• Subscribers pay. Members participate.

• Subscribers buy. Members belong.

Spotting the differences is the easy bit. But if you’re a legacy magazine publisher introducing a membership scheme, you need to communicate those differences to your most loyal readers to get them to take the leap from being a subscriber to becoming a member.

Katie Vanneck Smith has done that successfully at The Times, The Wall Street Journal and Tortoise Media. Now, as CEO of Hearst UK, she’s leading the charge to bring memberships to an iconic magazine portfolio. 

Being part of something

Just two years into her tenure at The House of Hearst, Katie has already overseen the introduction of membership offers for Elle, Good Housekeeping, Men’s Health, Women’s Health and soon, Prima.

When I spoke with her for The Publisher Podcast, I asked how she helps readers get their head around the difference between a subscription and a membership.

“I try and oversimplify things,” she says, “because I like to make sure my mum understands them.”

Her super-simple explanation is that subscribing to something is about setting up an ongoing payment. Membership is about the joy of being part of something.

“I subscribe to get my washing-up liquid delivered,  and I definitely don’t have an emotional relationship with my washing-up liquid. Maybe I should, but I don’t,” she says. “I subscribe because it’s easy, because I make a saving. You get a discount because you subscribe.”

Katie says becoming a member is a much more of an emotional proposition. “You belong. You probably have an emotional affinity to the club or the community that you are a member of, whether that’s a golf club [or] Good Housekeeping,” she explains.

Express your brand

Although Hearst is very much a portfolio publisher, Katie says the individual brand is the starting point for every magazine membership in the digital era. “Before digital disruption, as a portfolio company, economies of scale meant that we did exactly the same thing. We had the same business models, we had circulation, we had advertising, and the strength of these companies was built on this portfolio.”

However, with modern magazine memberships that mix print and digital, the portfolio approach no longer works.

“The strategy cannot be one-size-fits-all,” Katie says. “All of the things that were true for being in a portfolio in the physical print edition are actually fundamentally false when you then start to think about how you deal with an omnichannel brand.”

The expressions of the brand are very different, she outlines. “It’s really Basic Marketing 101: the audiences are different, the brands are different. What Elle does and how Elle connects with its communities, how Elle builds a paid-for proposition that people would be happy to join will, of course, be different to what Good Housekeeping does and what Prima does.”

What’s in a name?

One of the first membership programmes Katie worked on was Times+. “We created Culture+ in 2006 and it became Times+ in 2007. It was the precursor to building the paywalls and the digital subscription space which we rolled out in 2010.”

Looking around the subscription and membership ecosystem, there are still a few ‘plus’ membership offers out there, but for Katie now, the reality of ‘plus’ branding is that it is very generic.

“‘Plus’ is a one-size-fits-all proposition,” she says. “When you look at our different brands, we have Men’s Health ‘Squad’, we have Elle ‘Collective’, we have Good Housekeeping ‘VIP’. We’ll launch Runners’ World ‘Club’ next month. All of the brands have a very different proposition.”

Although she introduced ‘plus’ branding to the world, Katie doesn’t get to name Hearst’s membership schemes; that’s the job of magazine editors with their portfolio directors and marketeers. “I love the fact that magazines have in their DNA that passion, that connection with them and with their audiences that enables us to build real memberships, and not have to create something called ‘plus’ as a sort of bolt-on,” she notes.

While every brand has its own proposition, and memberships and subscriptions are different, Katie says there are some common factors in building out a magazine membership proposition.

“We’ve had subscription businesses for a long time – they’re a core part of the offering. So you don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. When we build our memberships… we think about some of the behavioral economics that underpins good subscriptions.”

These range from the presentation of membership offers – always have three options, always explain the benefits side by side – to bundling elements like print to make sure that customers are engaging with multiple touchpoints. “Everyone has a formula, ultimately. At the Wall Street Journal it was two products and five stories within a certain timeframe and you knew they weren’t going to churn.”

Katie says it’s also crucial to have a back office that can scale. “We’re not going to build the technology 16 times,” she explains. “Even if the customer proposition feels different, everything needs to be scalable. You need to build everything once, provide that flexibility at the customer end, not inside your business. Everything that’s back office, tech or the Martech that supports you, definitely only build that once.”

Membership is a team sport

Katie says that one of the things that has changed dramatically in publishing organisations is the partnership that has developed between marketers and other elements of the business.

“The reason we all actually work in the industry we work in is because we work on great brands that create great journalism, great editorial and great content. But I think the most exciting thing for me, having grown up in marketing, is that now the marketeers have gotten a sense of equality with their editorial colleagues.”

That partnership is key, Katie says, to delivering successful membership propositions, bringing together the infrastructure needed to deliver brand expression and the member experience. “The success of these businesses does require those departments to work together in a way that, 30 years ago, we really didn’t have to.”

Katie tells her team they are like The Avengers – all brilliant, but unable to save the world individually. “To build a new future for ourselves, we have to create our own luck, and you can’t do that by yourself,” she told me. “You have to bring a whole bunch of people into it, because, as my mother always says, ‘When you bring up children, it takes a village’.

“It’s exactly the same when you’re trying to turn around these companies and build something out for the next 100 years.”

This season of The Publisher Podcast & Newsletter is sponsored by Memberful, a best-in-class membership solution for independent publishers and journalists who want to diversify their revenue streams and connect with their audience.

Memberful is a powerful membership solution with a difference: you always retain full control over your brand, content, audience and business.

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