FEATURES: Women more receptive to magazine ads

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.

Sign In

Trouble signing in?

Reset Password: Click here

Contact Customer Support at

Customerservice@campaignasia.com