The Business

HarperCollins Publishers, part of News Corporation, is one of the largest and most successful publishing groups in the world. HarperCollins Publishers General Books provides a full range of services to book retailers and publishes extensively in all major sections of the book market.

Authors include icons of Australian publishing such as Henry Lawson, and A.B. (Banjo) Paterson as well as a prestigious crop of current bestselling and award-winning authors. Fiction authors include Colleen McCullough, Geraldine Brooks, and Gao Xingjian. Non-fiction authors include Donna Hay, Peter FitzSimons, George Negus, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, and Ricky Ponting.

The Marketing Challenge

Harper Collins needed some experienced marketing talent to step in whilst a staff member was on maternity leave. They needed to make sure that they wouldn’t lose momentum on projects – a key concern if they’d had to bring more junior temp staff coming up to speed.

Marketing Angel Katrina Flynn started working on the business in May 2008 working approximately two days per month as the projects required.

One of the key marketing challenges was to manage three new publishing titles:

• No Time to Cook by Donna Hay
• Science is Golden by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki
• The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea Buchanan & Miriam Peskowitz

Each title needed a well developed marketing plan to ensure successful adoption within the book trade and customer demand.

The second challenge was managing budgets to create innovative media plans and cut through in the cluttered publishing market, with a clearly communicated point of difference for these well published authors.

Donna Hay has previously published 16 bestselling books and a bi-monthly magazine, and Dr Karl 26 other titles.

The Daring Book for Girls needed to create a market for the Australian Edition after very successful sales of the US edition in the Australian market.

The Process

Katrina worked with the editorial, sales and marketing teams to develop the marketing plan, and create sales and promotional material to assist the sales team in driving the take up by book retailers.

In the case of Donna Hay there was careful consideration for the price point and a penetration strategy was pursued to be competitive and offer readers value for money in a cluttered cookbook market at Christmas time.

Media plans were developed that targeted buyers who were outside of the usual reach of the authors activity, and relationships were leveraged to ensure cost effective promotion.

An important consideration for two such high profile authors was alignment with their brand image, whilst ensuring that “New Book” was a clear call to action.

Working closely with the authors’ brand team was necessary to achieve the consistency in communications.

With Daring Book for Girls, the challenge was to engage the audience of 8-12 year old girls and to demonstrate new Australian content of the book on a tight budget. This was achieved by an innovative media buy online on social networking site Bebo.

Fun promotional items were developed to engage booksellers encouraging them to hand sell the title within stores.

Katrina also worked with the publicity team on potential promotional giveaways and launch events.

The Results

• Donna Hay’s No Time to Cook title sold out and it was the most successful release of her books to date.
• Bonus media opportunities were achieved by a 12 page reader promotion in Sunday Magazine (in The Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Herald Sun) that was not only given invaluable editorial support including front page pointers, but also an additional $200,000 worth of external promotional support (radio, point of sale, and newspaper advertising).
• This promotion was delivered outside of the consumer budget, and was exposed the brand to 3.291 million readers.
• Mix FM reader promotion in Sydney, Melbourne & Brisbane delivered additional support valued at $106,000 that was given as promotional air time.
• Dr Karl’s book Science is Golden resulted in an increase in 20% of sales from his last title in the previous year.
• Daring Book for Girls achieved its objectives and was exposed to 692,000 potential target readers through the online interactive promotion.

What The Client Says

“Katrina demonstrated the ability to creatively market within tight budget guidelines and challenged the way we approached our communications. She worked hard to delivered value over and above the marketing spend by maximising relationships and stakeholders that resulted in extraordinary consumer promotions”

Jim Demetriou, Marketing Director, HarperCollins