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Spotlight on reading

Penguin Random House owns some of the most famous brands in book publishing, but it’s on a mission to reach new audiences and its insight department is at the centre of that strategy. By Jane Bainbridge.

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These are interesting times for book lovers; there’s never been more fanfare around bestselling authors, more books being published, or more platforms by which to access stories. Earlier this year, book retailer Waterstones made a profit for the first time since the recession. Good times indeed. But against that, local authority budgets have been slashed by central government and one of the biggest casualties has been libraries, with hundreds closing across the country.

The landscape in which people are reading is shifting, and it is within this context that Penguin Random House (PRH) is trying to reach new audiences and encourage as many people as possible to access its books. 

The five-strong insight team at PRH, led by consumer insight director Louise Vinter, is certainly busy, and last year ran 88 projects across all of the company’s brands – Penguin, Puffin and Ladybird being the main consumer-facing ones. 

As well as its expertise and effort being recognised within the business, the insight department won Business Impact of the Year and was highly commended in the Best In-house Team category at the 2016 MRS/Research Live awards. 

“Consumer insight is pretty established at Penguin Random House now,” says Vinter. “If I had spoken to you a couple of years ago, it might have been that we still had to sell it in. But now it’s widely accepted that consumer insight is beneficial in supporting intuition and expertise.” 

Within the organisation, the brand teams – which fall into three categories: publishing brands, authors and licences – come to the central insight department when they have projects that need its input. The insight team works through a network of consumer insight experts in each of the eight publishing companies. 

“They know we can be doing one thing at a time with them. We need to continue evaluating the impact of our projects, making sure we’re spending our time on the books or the questions we think will have the most impact,” says Vinter.

“We have worked on qualitative and quantitative research projects on a number of our big authors; sometimes these are presented to the writers themselves. James Patterson is one of the biggest authors for us; he has a prolific output. I have presented consumer research to him – he is very receptive.” 

Penguin is a rarity in the publishing world, in that it is a recognisable brand in its own right. This can have advantages and disadvantages; while it is famous, people often associate it with classics – or, possibly, from reading Penguin books at school. 

“What we’re trying to do is help the team here shape Penguin as a relevant, modern brand for consumers. It’s exciting, actually, working with the teams who have this great brand,” adds Vinter.

Penguin is a particularly strong vehicle for the company to reach younger and teenage audiences. Both finding new readers and shedding light on who reads and who doesn’t by identifying audience segments are crucial, and the insight team has been working for some time with its own segments in adults and children. These are available to everyone in the business via an internal website. “All of our research uses our audience segments as a framework and a language – it’s become really familiar to everyone in the business,” adds Vinter. 

For example, two of Penguin’s segments are Pioneers and Chart Shoppers; both are heavy book buyers and love reading, but they have very different attitudes, behaviours and tastes. 

Pioneers like books that challenge and provoke, or that offer new insights into the world. A typical Pioneer book would be Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, a retelling of The Tempest, published in October 2016; or Blitzed, by Norman Ohler, a non-fiction title about the role of drug-taking in the Third Reich. “Pioneers respond to advertising that is different, disruptive and thought-provoking, such as the Penguin Little Black Classics and Pocket Penguins series, which simply gave a line from a book,” says Vinter. 

Chart Shoppers, meanwhile, are more likely to stick to tried and tested authors and genres, particularly crime and thriller, and romance. “They buy a lot of books in supermarkets and are heavily influenced by price and discounts – but are still one of our most valuable audience segments. Typical authors read by Chart Shoppers include James Patterson, Lee Child, Lesley Pearse and Clive Cussler.”

The segments are important in highlighting that not everyone who reads a lot is the same. “Because we work in a business where everybody loves books and reading, there can be a tendency for people to assume – not necessarily through any fault of their own – that everybody thinks about reading in a similar way to them. What we have been able to show through some of our more commercial reading segments is that there are lots of people out there – who love reading – who have quite different attitudes and priorities to people who work here.”


Focus on inclusion

Reaching wider audiences is all part of PRH’s inclusion work, and the company has set a goal to lead the industry in making publishing more inclusive by 2020. Later this year, Vinter and her team will run qualitative research to understand different audiences and how to reach them. 

“The focus of our analysis so far has been on highlighting where particular books have successfully reached a wider audience, so helping make the commercial case for inclusion. For example, Guy Martin has enjoyed big success by appealing to an audience outside of London and the South East, and Malorie Blackman’s books reach a high proportion of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) readers. It’s an area I feel passionately about for commercial reasons, but also to spread the joy and benefits of reading.

“PRH has launched Write Now, which aims to find and publish aspiring authors from under-represented communities and help them get their voices heard. So I’ve added the reader perspective, helping that team think about how we can also meet more diverse readers. It’s not just about publishing more diverse authors – it’s also about understanding the audience and the different things people want to read about. Are we reaching people in the right places?”

Format is also claiming a fair bit of Vinter’s attention at the moment. Audio books are reaching more diverse audiences – often an urban, younger, male one – as well as appealing to those who are rediscovering books. “It does seem that they are increasing the reading pool,” says Vinter. “A lot of people just listen at home, but it’s amazing how many people listen in their lunch breaks, or while travelling.” Audience segments come in useful when deciding which books to put in the audio format. 

Another aspect of PRH’s audience work is its consumer closeness programme, aimed at encouraging people within the business to understand their customers better. It is particularly focused on lighter readers – or people who don’t read – and on reaching people outside of the London bubble. 

“We have been getting people from the business to go to places outside of London and the South East – to talk to people and understand their lives. For example, if people don’t commute, they may not have seen book advertising. When you live in this London, South-East world, you don’t necessarily realise what’s going on in the rest of the country,” explains Vinter.


Young readers

One of the busiest areas for insight is in children’s publishing, and encouraging children to read – and to maintain a reading habit – fits closely with PRH’s strategy of reaching new audiences. 

Rosa Halford, consumer insights manager, is focused on the children’s market and has been working with the department, demonstrating the benefit of insight. “At every point – before we buy a book and when we’re finding the target audience, designing covers – there’s an insight voice, or people are aware of what they could do with insight at each stage,” says Halford. 

Because children’s publishing and licensing is so trend-led, getting the team out and meeting children is particularly important. For younger staff members who don’t have children, the value of this is clear – but, interestingly, it’s just as vital for members of staff who are parents, because the danger is that they assume their offspring are representative of all children. 

“We need to make sure they meet kids from different backgrounds – not just from London, not just middle-class kids – and that they are being stretched in their perceptions of what’s out there, and what’s going on in kids’ worlds,” adds Halford. 

PRH has adopted a number of techniques for this, including shop-alongs with incentivised respondents. Halford also runs ‘Detective Days’ every month, when she takes randomly selected key members of the children’s team to a location to observe and talk with youngsters in their own environments. For example, they have visited the Science Museum and Hamleys, and are planning a trip to the zoo. They are given a briefing pack, with prompts about things to look out for and eavesdrop on, or questions to ask – but it’s all done with a very light touch. 

“It gets them into a child-related context. It might not be that we’re officially researching, but we’re going into spaces that are relevant to them. It allows us to keep an eye on trends – what’s popular and how different shops are displaying things. It’s about being away from their desk and connecting with the consumer’s world,” says Halford. “I want them to understand that it’s about having an insightful mindset, a curious mindset, and understanding those clues – then being able to derive patterns and trends from those.” 

There are multiple complexities around researching this market, not least that parents may be heavy book buyers for their kids, but have dropped out of reading themselves. 

“We look to foster a love of reading from the word go, and that’s where our pre-school, consumer-facing brand Ladybird is such a big opportunity,” says Halford. “We’re working with the Ladybird team to make the most of that brand and reach the next generation of parents. It has huge nostalgia value, but we now need to make it relevant to those younger parents, and make sure we’re bringing in diverse consumers.”  

One of the biggest challenges for children’s research is the very narrow age targets. While adult research may involve 16- to 34-year-olds, a typical kids’ target group could be seven- to nine-year-olds – and being that focused can be expensive to arrange. Then there is the matter of safeguarding, which means the minutia has to be considered. Halford cites having to slice grapes lengthways to avoid a choking hazard when offering a snack to children involved in a focus group. Simply getting to kids is hard because they are so busy – with school, homework and extra-curricular activities – so research is often planned for school holidays. 

Finally, the fact that children change so quickly means “one-shot initiatives aren’t enough”. Halford says: “You can’t just do one big jazzy thing and then that’s it. You’ve got to make sure there’s a constant stream of fresh, up-to-date insights.”


New methods

The PRH team is using multiple research methodologies depending on the project. There is classic research, such as its panel of about 4,500 people, which is managed by ResearchBods and has been running for more than three years. 

The team has also used the Google Design Sprint method for testing new products on three or four projects. This involves taking a team away from their jobs for a week and going through a set process to brainstorm ideas for working prototypes. The stages range from sketching solutions, building them and then testing them with real users. 

This technique was used on PRH’s book-recommendation platform, Penguin Flipper – a core strand of Penguin’s Christmas digital marketing campaign, which achieved more than 30,000 ‘flips’ at Christmas. 

“It’s not replacing concept testing and market research – it’s supplementing. Using this method has meant that user testing is brought in at this very early stage,” says Vinter. 

The central premise for PRH’s business, and for insight’s role in supporting it, remains to get closer to readers – no matter what their book preferences or their reading moments of choice – and that requires broad and varied research techniques. 

We hope you enjoyed this article.
Research Live is published by MRS.

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