BBC TopGear drives V8 engines for 8th anniversary issue

Worldwide Media owned BBC TopGear celebrates its eighth anniversary in India with V8 engines and Porsche Cayenne Turbo.

Worldwide Media owned BBC TopGear is celebrating its eighth anniversary in India and has come out with an issue that has several stories woven around the theme, 8, along with focus on top automobile brands such as Porsche Cayenne Turbo, Range Rover, Audi A6 and others.

The cover story of the anniversary issue revolves around cars that use V8 engines and is woven around their strength and performance. It has an exclusive review story on the Porsche Cayenne Turbo, which it claims has been exclusively done by TopGear. Other than that, it uses a Maruti Suzuki 800 cc Alto and a Suzuki 800 cc bike and written logs of the vehicles' performance between Delhi and Attari border in Punjab. It also carries content on the Range Rover vs Polaris, Jaguar F Type Convertible and Audi A6.

The magazine will celebrate its 100th issue in December.

Speaking about the issue, Girish Karkera, editor, BBC TopGear Magazine India, says, "We are reaching out to the aspirational Indian, who likes driving and reading about cars and bikes."

Karkera adds that any blog, website, magazine or paper that writes on cars and bikes is potentially a competitor to TopGear and the magazine's nearest competitors are Autocar and OverDrive.

The eighth anniversary issue is out on the stands with more than 250 pages including posters and is priced at Rs 150.

BBC TopGear has a strong market in urban centres such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai. It targets people in the age group of 22-28 years, who are aspirational and like to own a car and read more about it.

Karkera says that the magazine has been focussing more on the design and style part, with a strong focus on photographs.

The magazine claims to have a circulation figure of 95,000 to 1,05,000 copies. Although the magazine has been extremely low on the promotions for the eighth anniversary issue, it plans to keep a strong focus on the upcoming 100th issue in December. Apart from social media marketing through Facebook and Twitter, activities at Crosswords and Landmark stores are being carried out to create buzz.

With a slowdown in the automobile advertising market, the advertising garnered by BBC TopGear has also gone down by nearly 10 per cent as compared to the same time last year. The ad content ratio for the current issue is 35: 65.

About its digital strategy, the magazine reveals that it is using diet size articles and shortened stories to arouse the curiosity of the reader, who then looks for a more detailed article on the subject in the magazine. The shelf life of the magazine is 6 months to 1 year.

According to the company, every visitor spends nearly four minutes per visit to its site and reads at least four stories on every visit. Since October 2012, the number of Facebook fans has grown from 19,000 to 3,65,000.

The magazine began operations in 2005 in India.