Advertise and women will buy - at least that is what a new media
survey by CIA and LVMH, the world's largest luxury brands company, has
found.
Almost 60 per cent of female respondents purchased products after seeing
an ad in a magazine such as Elle, Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Marie
Claire.
The figure was lower for clothes but still significant - between about
20 and 40 per cent.
CIA Hong Kong international media director Sherrin Loh said that the
Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea survey proved that targeting to women
through women's magazines was more effective than using any other single
medium.
The main reason was that women tended to look at fashion and beauty
publications as "something which keeps them abreast of trends and allows
them to be aware of all the different products available to them", Ms
Loh told MEDIA.
"It's not the same as television, for example, because with television
you can't search for things. The Internet is a very effective search
vehicle, but there isn't that loyalty there yet," she said.
Because of this, women tended to read beauty and fashion magazines from
cover to cover, the survey found
Men, on the other hand, were less likely to read men's magazines from
cover to cover. More often than not, they would only read stories that
interested them.
However, Ms Loh cautioned that more research was needed since the men's
sample size was smaller than the women's group.
The objective of the survey was to further understand and gain valuable
insight into the key issues that advertisers faced within the highly
cluttered and competitive magazine arena.
One of the insights uncovered by the study was that 33 per cent of women
read magazines from cover to cover. Others read the main articles first
before reading everything else. Just 20 per cent read only the articles
they were interested in.
"For the very first time, we now have accurate readership figures of
luxury goods consumers. Many of the magazines used by luxury advertisers
are not registered on the industry readership reports, so in the past we
have had to rely on publishers' statements," said CIA Hong Kong managing
director Caroline Foster.
"We now know what our consumers are reading and many of the results vary
from those claimed in the industry."
The research was conducted by Asian research company, DN Acorn.
