Results of American Fencing Magazine Redesign

The USFA magazine was redesigned to great fanfare.  Now that a few issues of the new magazine have been delivered to the eager fencing populace, what’s the result?  Was the redesign worth the time and effort put into it?

From a business stance, the American Fencing magazine redesign was geared to make the magazine a more attractive media property and thereby land some “big fish” in terms of advertisers.  Premium brands who had the big marketing budgets and who would love fencing’s demographic (and it’s a demo to drool over for any premium or luxury brand.)

Well, we’re a few issues in and no premium brands are here.  The increase in revenue is due to increasing the ad rates of the fencing equipment vendors who were already advertising.  Actually, we’ve debated long and hard about whether or not to continue advertising, since we can connect with fencers daily through the web but only 4 times per year with American Fencing. 

Fencing.Net runs surveys several times a year among our readers to ballpark where we need to go with content and what areas are good and bad.  It’s amazing what people will put down in an anonymous survey that they wouldn’t do in an email to you.  While I prefer to be able to respond to people directly, I understand that most people are more comfortable issuing criticism when anonymous.

Over the past several surveys we’ve tracked satisfaction with the USFA’s magazine and there has not been much movement in customer (reader) satisfaction from before and after the redesign.  The only area where the numbers have moved is in the quality of photos.  Every other content area and overall satisfaction remains flat at a “ho-hum” level of 3 out of 5.

If the ad agency and the USFA are not pushing some of the “big fish” through their sales funnel to land them as advertisers in 2008, then they have not accomplished their goals of diversifying the advertising income from American Fencing.  In the long term that’s only going to hurt the USFA as the magazine will continue to be viewed as a cost center rather than a profit center. 

Cost centers get ignored, profit centers get grown.  The magazine needs to grow to meet the changing needs and expectations of the readership.