A customer magazine is a

magazine A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule (often weekly or monthly), containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, purchase price, prepaid subscriptions, or by a combinatio ...

produced by a business as a means of communicating to its

customer In sales, commerce, and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for ...

s. It is a branch of

custom media Custom, customary, or consuetudinary may refer to: Traditions, laws, and religion * Convention (norm), a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted rules, norms, standards or criteria, often taking the form of a custom * Norm (social), a ...

, a product that broadly shares the look and feel of a newsstand or

consumer magazine A consumer is a person or a group who intends to order, or uses purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs, who is not directly related to entrepreneurial or business activities. T ...

but is paid for in part or whole by a business. Rather than copy sales and advertising, the primary goal of a customer magazine is to achieve a particular business objective. This could be for a firm to cross- or up-sell, change brand perception or engender loyalty. In-flight magazines, sponsored by airlines, were among the first customer magazines, and remain typical of the genre. In the UK, every

supermarket A supermarket is a self-service Retail#Types of outlets, shop offering a wide variety of food, Drink, beverages and Household goods, household products, organized into sections. This kind of store is larger and has a wider selection than earli ...

chain now provides a customer magazine to promote its products through recipes and other food editorial. Many prominent digitally-native companies, like WebMD and Net-À-Portér, have released customer magazines of their own. Some customer magazines carry advertising; this is often seen as a useful way to offset the cost but equally can have some benefit in making the product look more like a regular magazine. As a communications tool customer magazines are enormously powerful and allow firms to have a level of engagement with their customers that other media do not have. They are particularly good at conveying difficult and complex messages to an audience. They also lend themselves well to measurement and tracking, offering tangible information on return on investment and performances against objectives.

References

External links

''Association of Publishing Agencies''
{{Authority control Magazine publishing Customer magazine

Magazine A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule (often weekly or monthly), containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, purchase price, prepaid subscriptions, or by a combinatio ...