MARKETING MIRAGES

McCall's was the real Graustark, a place of total unreality. The underlying reason for ladies' magazines, I learned, was never ladies' needs but advertisers' needs. Manufacturers of soap powder and diapers and Tampax were assured an all-female readership. But the average family income of our subscribers was $13,000; fewer than one in four had gone beyond high school. The magazine we were trying to sell them, more accurately, to give them -- the price being only a fraction of what it actually cost to produce it -- was aimed not at serving their needs but exciting their fantasies. The editorial pages showed readers an impossible never-never land of furs and jewels and designer clothes. Our Christmas dinner menu featured roast suckling pig, fantasy food not even moderately rich readers could afford, and certainly could not find at the supermarket; even if they did, it would not fit into any known home oven. In seventh grade at Lincoln School, our class had made a field trip to West Virginia, and each child lived for a wk with a sharecropper's family. One sharecropper's daughter had a Hormel ham ad tacked to the cabin wall beside her bed. "If ah gits hungry, ah licks it," she said. The relationship of our magazine to its readers was the same. McCall's was the lickable Hormel ham ad writ large.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe