Readers' Responses to Product+ Strategies of Print Media Brands: Increasing Readership or Commoditization of Print Media?

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Taking the Flemish print media as a case in point, this article analyzes if and to what extent the marketing strategy of product+ impacts on brand image and sales in the short and long term. The article confronts a marketing perspective dealing with the effectiveness of premiums, showing premiums as a win-win situation for readers and print media with a news-in-society-perspective that points to the commoditization of news by stimulating audiences to follow premium attractiveness rather than news quality. Additionally, the article explores the impact of product+ on relationships between a printed medium's marketing and newsroom departments. A web and offline survey (N = 722) combined with in-depth interviews with senior newsroom and marketing management (N = 13) reveal a number of trends. Findings indicate that premiums do not change the brand image held by respondents. For many newspapers and magazines, premiums are shown to contribute to a one-off increase in sales. All newspapers manage to keep the extra readers for a little while. Longer-term effects appear more with newspapers with a limited one-off sales increase (but manage to keep those new readers). Newspapers with higher short term audience increase attract a fickle audience that disappears shortly after the premium promotion. On the other hand, long-term increases in magazine readership only appear with magazines that show the best short-term results. With regards to the relationship between newsroom and marketing, product+ seems to enhance closer contact, which is accepted more in the case of magazines than newspapers.