‘Femina’: Fifty years, five covers, one issue

With its golden jubilee around the corner, women’s magazine ‘Femina’ has, for the first time in its history, come up with five covers for one issue. The magazine is mainly hoping to attract different categories of advertisers with this effort, apart from pushing up sales through high visibility

Women’s fortnightly magazine ‘Femina’ has been paying a lot of attention on ‘covering’ things up lately. 2008 marks the golden jubilee for ‘Femina’ and in a pre-celebration of sorts, the magazine has, for the first time in its history, come up with five covers for one issue (dated October 10, 2007).

‘Femina’ required a boost in sales around its 50th year, so a two-fold activity was undertaken. Firstly, ‘Femina’ generated curiosity amongst its readers by conducting a poll on the 50 Most Beautiful Women in India today, giving interested voters a list of 100 famous women of Indian origin. ‘Femina’ relied heavily on below-the-line activities to do the trick. The biggest driver of the poll was the magazine itself, which carried regular content about it. This was followed by an SMS activity, inviting readers and those interested to nominate whoever they felt was worthy of being in that list, out of the 100 shortlists. The magazine’s website, www.femina.in, also carried an option for visitors to take part in the poll. Ads in ‘Mumbai Mirror’ completed the marketing effort on this.

Once the results were compiled, they found their way into the October 10 issue. Next, ‘Femina’ decided to take up the top five Most Beautiful Women (Aishwarya Rai, Bipasha Basu, Preity Zinta, Priyanka Chopra and Dipika Padukone) and create five cover pages – one each for these five. However, the content in all the five editions will be the same, but ‘Femina’ is counting on the five versions to become a luxury item or a collectible of sorts. Each edition will also carry a few CD containing wallpapers and screensavers of the chosen 50 women.

This effort has been undertaken with the business objective of pushing up sales, as more covers means more shelf space on retailer’s outlets, as well as on newsstands. PoS activities and prominent displays at cash counters in outlets such as Landmark and Crossword are also being leveraged.

Apart from sales, ‘Femina’ has been looking to attract different categories of advertisers for a while now. “We usually get beauty, fashion and jewellery advertisers, as is the case with most women’s magazines,” says Asha Kharga, marketing manager, ‘Femina’. “While these constitute the staple for us and are important, we’re hoping to bring in other categories as well.” The magazine, targeted at 25-34 year old women, sure is giving out the right signals to advertisers in these five editions – they carry ads from advertisers such as Nokia, Apple iPod, National Stock Exchange, Maruti SX4, and even some men’s products. “Our aim is to let advertisers know that today’s woman is not uni-dimensional, and is well tuned in to new technologies and digitisation,” explains Kharga.

To intimate women about this new issue, ‘Femina’ has even tied up with Airtel to send SMSes to its TG, informing them of the same. There have been no price changes, and the editions will cost the stipulated Rs 30 each. A new dimension of the magazine’s famous ‘Believe’ campaign is also underway.

For the record, ‘Femina’ currently has a circulation of 1,39,000 (as per ABC) and its readership stands at 9,04,000 (as per the last NRS).

However, this is not the first time that Worldwide Media (WWM) has undertaken such as marketing effort; its film magazine ‘Filmfare’ too, launched five covers for the same issue in association with the movie ‘Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna’ at the time of its release.