The move was made in response to the business daily's falling circulation, which had dropped to around 10,000. NST Publishing's marketing advisor, Lim Chee Seng, said there was no prospect of a recovery in BT's circulation in the near future. "The Business Times' circulation had stagnated. It had dropped a few years ago and never rebounded."
With the addition, NST has doubled its business section to 16-pages and changed the section's masthead to BT.
To entice readers of BT and rival papers The Sun and The Star, NST has launched a television campaign supplemented with direct mail, press and radio advertising.
The ads use humour and give the impression that business section readers - from housewives to office workers - will become "super knowledgeable" about business, said Eveline Robijns, group brand director at Leo Burnett, which created the campaign.
Lim added: "We like to use humour in our ads ... we want to be seen to be a friendly newspaper."
According to the January-June ABC audit, NST has a circulation of 135,000.
