There are loads of benefits to doing things this way, but what I really love about it is that we’ve got this ongoing relationship with our target market Anna Rafferty, Penguin books
Digital Marketing Director Anna Rafferty knows that consumers want more active engagement with the brands they love. At the Redesigning Business Summit 2010 she outlined how Penguin books is working to meet this demand.
Read the transcript below.
Anna Rafferty, Digital Marketing Director, Penguin
Hello, morning everybody. I’m going to talk about working for Penguin Books. I hope you’re all very familiar with Penguin, but just in case you’re not, we’re a global billion-dollar business now. We’re a trade publisher and we’re part of the Pearson Group.
Listening to all of the speakers so far this morning I’ve learned lots of things. For example, the bigger your company is the more risk averse it might be – and how innovation comes in a crisis. In a way I kind of wish I hadn’t heard everybody else speaking because I’m frantically rewriting things that I want to say in my head.
But one of the things that did strike me was that I’m very lucky. Because even though I do work for a group that is part of a FTSE 100 company, risk taking is part of the DNA of trade publishing, because actually we’re a gambling business, and in the 150 books that we publish every month, maybe 20 will really work, and you don’t know, necessarily, which ones they’re going to be until it happens.
But I’m going to talk to you more specifically... I guess that the risk taking in our DNA means that we get a lot of permission to do things. In fact, I don’t ask permission – I ask forgiveness. I’m going to talk to you specifically about a crisis that I found myself in about two and a half years ago.
So, I’ve got a slide that I’m going to try and get onto, there we go. My problem was that we had a list of teenage books. Penguin publishes everything from Baby Touch for three months old all the way to everything you could ever possibly want to read. Specifically we were thinking about teenagers and we knew that there was a growing teenage books market. Harry Potter and Twilight have helped, but actually in general the young adult book market is very healthy – they’re reading more than they ever did. We could see this growth and we really wanted to jump on it. We had a fantastic list of books and authors that we wanted to bring to market, but when thinking about what we were going to do we realised we had a massive problem, because we didn’t have a direct channel at all to speak to these people.
All of my facts are on there already, but essentially, the adults working in the places that teens got information from (magazines and TV and social networks – the Guardian is the gatekeeper of that information) had made a decision that books weren’t interesting or sexy, and they didn’t want to feature them. So, I did the rounds. I went round and talked to – I can’t name names – but I talked to Facebook and Bebo and teen magazines, and I said, 'Why are you stopping your books pages?' You know, 'Why are you not featuring stuff anymore? You do such great stuff for music and for games, why don’t you do the same thing for books?' And they all just said, 'Oh, you know, it’s just not a priority. It’s not interesting, they’re not interested in it.' And then I thought: do you know what, I don’t believe that they’re not interested in it because I can obviously see that the sales are going up.
So we commissioned some research, actually a huge amount of research, where we talked – and this is very UK-specific as publishing is quite local – to young people from 13-18, but the core age being 14, 15, 16, about their reading habits and what they liked. And, as it turned out, they did love to read – as we knew – and they enjoyed books. They read loads online. They spent all of their time online. None of this is a surprise, I’m sure. But they really didn’t have a home in the book-selling industry. They weren’t comfortable in book shops particularly. Amazon and online retailers weren’t their natural place to be because they don’t have credit cards and they didn’t feel like they could get access to the information they needed. And, of course, our traditional flag wavers, the literary press, was not a very natural home either, so we weren’t able to tell them about the books we were publishing.
We thought about this, and thought, this is a real problem because we really believe in our product. We know they want it, we just don’t know how to get it to them. And we thought, what we’re going to have to do, even though this is counter, in general, to my strategy – I’m Digital MD so I think about online marketing and digital publishing and new business models in digital, I go to where communities are rather than create them myself. And because no one wanted to do it for me I thought, I’m actually going to have to do this. I’m going to have to give those teenagers that I know love to read a place of their own. I’m going to have to create what I can’t get the other social networks to work with me on. For a trade publisher it was a very daunting thing because that’s not my core business. That’s not what we do. We don’t build social networking websites. It’s a big risk-taking business, but to ask my CEO for quite a lot of money to go and do something completely different was, you know, a moment that gave me pause before I walked into that room.
Thankfully, the business agreed that this is the way we needed to speak to these young people. We needed to get to them online. I had tried everything else that I could do but I couldn’t make it happen by other means, and they said 'yes absolutely, we’re going to back you... why don’t you do this? Look into this?' So, I thought, 'Okay, fantastic, I’m going to have to create now a destination place online for teenagers to come and talk about and co-create and interact around books and authors and character brands.' But I thought the second I said that – maybe it’s a real, kind of, personal anxiety about getting older – I thought to myself, 'Well, I can’t do that,' you know, I’m going to be crap.
I’m going to say things like, 'yo kids,' and I’m going to really expose the fact that Penguin is a very West London... I mean, I live in Kew Gardens, and we wear high heels every day and I’ve been known to wear lots of pearls... and I’m just not the right person to do this because I’m just going to patronise and alienate that group which is, frankly, what I thought a lot of those, kind of, adult media gatekeepers were also doing by not allowing them to have the books they wanted to.
So this was my great fear. Was this like we’re going to be like your dad dancing? And I thought, well, I can’t possibly do it. So, I thought, what I’m going to have to do is get them to do it for me. I’m going to have to give the control of this destination over to teenagers, and that was something that we actually, in a very practical sense, did. We connected with an agency who specialises in youth marketing and have access to fantastic networks of what they call 'at risk teenagers' who fall through formal education cracks and things like that.
Also, the book-buying teens who are very interested in books and want to do things for their UCAS forms and record of achievement and so on. We went all over the country and we collected all sorts of groups of young people and we started asking them lots and lots of questions: Would this be interesting? What kind of thing would you like to see? What kind of thing do you like to read? Are you interested in authors? Do you actually know who writes the books that you like? Could you recognise them if I showed you a picture? Have you heard their name before? Would you want to hear more from them? Do you want to talk about it to other people?
And when we got those fundamental questions about what maybe the content of our site would be about, we started saying: Well, actually what should this look like? And what should it be called? They came up with the brand, which was Spinebreakers, which actually I think is very clever. For a while it was going to be called I Am Not a Fish, which they all thought was hilarious. No one in our office got it at all, but apparently it’s something because they associate penguins with fish and stuff. They all got it. Anyway, thankfully it went to Spinebreakers in the end.
When people were pitching for the design of the UI of the website we passed all the designs by different groups of teenagers. They helped appoint the company that we eventually used, and then when we were developing the site we did lots and lots of iteration testing with different groups. It was really important to me to keep them national, not just London, and different kinds of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds so that there was as broad a representation of young people as possible. We tested, tested, tested, and then launched.
This is Spinebreakers. Obviously this is a snapshot I did two weeks ago when I sent my slides in, because it changes all the time. We realised that after we launched this website that actually that wasn’t enough, because now I’ve got to maintain it. I always tell my team that online campaigns are like a baby. People think they’re like projects, that they’re like posters, that you just put them out there and they live. I think that they’re like a child – that actually getting them to be live is your pregnancy and then you launch them and that’s birth, and then they keep you up late at night and they cost you more than you think, and you need to look after them all the time because if you don’t they die. And so it was the looking after them that we thought, well, I still can’t do this, it’s not my core competency. We realised that we needed to have essentially a management structure, an editorial structure from the target market. And, actually, that’s what... this panel on the right is called The Crew.
I’ve truncated just for neatness, but it goes on for bloody ever. We have three tiers of young people’s involvement now. We’ve got something that’s called The Crew and they are about 20 young people. There’s quite a high churn because, you know, they get to a certain age and they discover booze and boys and they’re not interested anymore, so we’re constantly recruiting for them and they, by necessity, need to be in or around London because they come into our offices once every two or three weeks. We sit down and we pitch to them. We pitch books that we have coming up. Authors go in and talk to them, and they have editorial control over the website. They say what it is that they think is interesting on there or not; the story they should commission, authors they want to meet, events they want to run. We give them a budget and they go off and set up panels. They did an event at the Bath Literary Festival recently.
They surprise us all the time. At our first editorial meeting we pitched – again, I’m being that patronising person – but I pitched a lot of what I would call contemporary fiction. Very light, cartoony covers, funny, great reads – I read it all the time – they rejected it completely, unanimously. They all, instead, honed in on a book called the Atomic Bazaar which is about the nuclear arms trade. It’s about following the cash for the nuclear arms trade. They’ve asked us for more classics, and more modern classics, because that’s what they’re interested in. And it made me realise again that I forgot that when I was a teenager I was much more militant and passionate. I cared about causes and I was smart and I have more time to do these things. It’s not actually all 'yo kids!' These are eloquent, engaged young people who don’t want to be treated like idiots.
As well as that core group of about 20 who are the real decision makers, we’ve got a second tier which are deputies who we give back-end access to the website and who are all over the country, up and down, and who we email all the time. There’s about 80 of those, and they write every piece of content that goes on this site, which is why you might see a spelling mistake – it’s not my fault – because the homegrown part of the website is the point. You know, the point is it’s actually theirs, it’s not mine. And then, you know, the final tier is that anybody can contribute to the site, so it’s a two-way street of content.
Obviously there are loads of benefits of doing things this way, but what I really love about it is that we’ve got this ongoing relationship with this target market which is useful in so many ways. Obviously, they do all the work on the website which is great, but they’re all this fantastic source of inspiration and knowledge. We’ve gone to them with questions about should we commission this book? We’ve given them manuscripts and said, 'What do you think? Should we buy it – we don't think we should .' And they all came back and said, 'We love it, we love it, buy it!' It’s called Thirteen Reasons Why. It’s about teenage suicide which is why it gave us pause in the office, but we bought it on the back of their reaction. And we talk to them all the time about, you know, 'Should the jacket look like this, or look like this? Which do you prefer?'
We’ve now got relationships with other businesses who have come to us because they are really interested in the fact that we have this direct relationship with them all the time, so you’ll see on there something called Breaking. That’s a relationship with Island Records who came to us and said, 'We love what you do with teenagers, can we talk to your teenagers too?' Once a month our teams go into their offices and they pitch their new music artists and undiscovered talent at them and get feedback.
I have... Have I got time? Are you lurking because I’m in trouble?
Vijay Vaitheeswaran, The Economist
Yes, I’m lurking, fascinating though it is.
Anna Rafferty, Digital Marketing Director, Penguin
I have got one thing to show you and people in back end control you can truncate it if you wish. I asked them if they were faced with a group of marketing and design people what they should want to tell you about what they want from their world and from their products, and this is what they told us:
Video playback
Unidentified male #1
I’d like to say try harder, be sincere, be subtle, be engaging. Trust is important if we don’t trust you we aren’t going to buy you.
Unidentified female #1
What I want is I want you to stop [unclear] and plus I want creative products and more versatility. I want difference, like, where you don’t have to copy everyone, like, creativity to the mass, to the full. Like, I’m young, yeah, like I need to be impressed by, like, the products themselves. Like, I wear pink trainers to be different and if it weren’t for those I would just be the same as everyone else.
Unidentified female #2
I think junk mail is irritating to have to delete, also mail you get through the door is not eco friendly at all and isn’t worth... isn’t selling product to me. I want to be sold the product as well that’s worth my while. I don’t want something that I’m never going to use.
Unidentified male #2
What I’d like is a product... what I want is a product that engages young people and treats us all as individuals without treating us like sheep. I also like it to be affordable because not every young person is absolutely loaded. I’m the other example, I’m quite cheap myself, so yeah, that’s what I want.
Unidentified male #3
Well, first of all make the prices go down for the brands that we love. Now, I mean, so what’s the point of making all the prices so high if you’re selling that brand so much? That’s one of the... that’s one of the things I want to bring out. Another thing is the adverts aren’t telling us nothing about any brands. Where are the adverts? Give us some advertising and tell us more about what we can... where we can buy them and stuff. Just give us some info. And, yeah, the prices are too high basically. See, I’m on budget, right, and stuff should go lower than they are already. I don’t care if you think it’s cheap. I want it cheaper, really cheaper, I mean, like [unclear] chop [?] cheaper.
Unidentified female #3
Sometimes they think that if, like a celebrity is wearing [unclear] or something then they wouldn’t... then they think that the young people are going to buy it, but in my opinion I don’t think that I would buy it because I wear my own stuff and I don’t, I don’t really care for, if the celebrity’s wearing it.
Unidentified female #4
I think freebies are a really good thing, like, they certainly attract my attention. I’m way more likely if I’ve got the freebie sitting next to me to check out the store or the website and I know that a lot of young people are more, like, obsessed with material things than promises they’re never going to see fulfilled.
Unidentified female #5
I want a product that reaches my OCD standards. I want a product that doesn’t take up too much pocket space. I want a product that enables me to be me wherever I may be.
Unidentified male #4
Basically, the way to get better information out of us it to talk directly to us to find out exactly if your marketing schemes are reaching us. I think you guys should employ young people to, you know, be your advisors and talk directly and give you the right information, what’s in on the street, what new bands are going on and basically, you know, pay us to do the job.