The Book Group

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There’s a magnificent outlook from the roof terrace of Carmelite House on Victoria Embankment. To the east, The Shard and the gleaming skyscrapers of the City; to the west, the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye, with the Thames sparkling in the sunshine as it winds its way in between.  

The roof terrace, with its sweeping, filmic panorama, would make a great location for a dramatic scene in a novel, with a canny eye to a subsequent TV or movie adaptation. It has certainly proved a terrific place to hold a book launch. For Carmelite House is the relatively new UK headquarters of Hachette, one of the world’s book publishing giants. It’s far removed from the cluttered, poky, slightly ramshackle building one might presuppose would house a bookish business. Rather, this smartly refurbished edifice is bright, airy and smacks of slick corporate processes.  

Federal structure

The impression of centralised efficiency is no accident. Until last year, Hachette’s businesses were spread across various London sites: Hodder & Stoughton was in Euston, Orion in Covent Garden, Octopus on Shaftesbury Avenue and Little, Brown a stone’s throw away along the riverside. Today, all seven divisions are under the one roof. Each is run with a large degree of autonomy, and some have responsibility for numerous publishing brands – or ‘imprints’, to use the industry terminology. Little, Brown for instance has a dozen imprints in its portfolio, including Abacus, Atom, Constable, Orbit, Sphere and Virago.  

Hachette still makes great play of its ‘federal’ structure, under which each division has a huge amount of decision-making leeway. However, while safeguarding this, it has in recent years sought to introduce efficiencies and provide stronger centralised support for its businesses through group functions such as digital, communications, IT, HR, finance, international sales and insight.  

Clearly, it is with the latter in mind that I am here, interviewing Louisa Livingston, group insight and innovation development director, in a minimalist meeting room where the sole concession to homely furnishings is – utterly unsurprisingly – several shelves of books.

Louisa Livingston

Instinct-led

“Just the fact that we are based in London is enough to show we are not representative of the broad spectrum of readers that we have in the marketplace,” Livingston tells me. “This is why we need research, and why I was brought in to set up an insight team. 

“We have lots of different data sources from sales, our websites, various media information, social, app data, and so on. My role – my team’s role – is to help navigate the business through those kinds of areas, some of which are incredibly confusing, some of which are less so, but people need a bit of help turning it into action or making sure it gets used. That’s what’s really important to me – providing information that people can actually do something with.” 

Livingston joined Hachette in May 2013, having been vice-president of global consumer insight at EMI. Like publishing, the music business relies, to a large degree, on gut instinct when it comes to identifying sellable product. This could be anathema to an analytical insight expert, but Livingston asserts that she is very proud to have worked in two instinct-led fields.  

Group insight’s tagline is ‘inspire, inform, empower, innovate’ – which neatly encapsulates its mission. A major part of her role, says Livingston, is to deliver insight that inspires people to have new ideas and empowers them to follow these through.  

“Gut feeling is really important,” she adds. “It is more important than insight, I would say. But the insight is part of the toolkit to support, challenge, question, confirm, or empower you to take more risks, if you are really excited about something and if insight supports it. I would never want anyone in this business to use consumer insight – or insight generally – to the detriment of their gut instinct, or for it to replace gut instinct. It’s really important that the two areas work very closely together.” 

Segmentation

Livingston set up the group insight operation from scratch and now leads a team of four. In addition to this central team, there is an insight leader at each of the seven divisions. They take the research delivered from the centre and make it relevant for their division, and Livingston meets regularly with each of them. “We feed out into all of the companies,” she says. “If we just sat as a group team, you wouldn’t have someone invested enough in each business. It would be too difficult to understand all the businesses closely enough to know what makes them tick.” 

On arriving at Hachette, Livingston’s priority was to develop a proprietary segmentation methodology to help colleagues understand book-buyers better. This can be accessed via an online Navigator Dashboard and is widely used, but it quickly became apparent that – this being book publishing, after all – segmentation information would have more impact in book form. This spawned the Group Insight Segmentation Handbook, which runs to 256 pages and covers 10 segments – such as Pioneers and Followers – in exhaustive detail.  

The handbook addresses what each segment stands for, its size in comparison to the overall population, differences from other segments, favourite genres, book covers and so on – all highly useful information in a simple-to-grasp, neatly laid out, easy-access format. 

Further data is accessible via the Navigator Dashboard, which provides information on more than 880 authors and nearly 400 book tests. Hachette runs an author tracker survey to profile and monitor author brands, looking at such things as awareness and fan activity. Separately, there is the Spotlight Monitor, which Livingston describes as a celebrity opportunity barometer. “I can’t tell you too much about that, beyond saying that we built an econometric model around the data that comes out of it, and we use that to inform our acquisitions. It was all created in-house, with some help from an external statistician.” 

Livingston’s guardedness on this subject can, in part, be explained by commercial sensitivities around the highly competitive area of celebrity books. But it’s not only the fear of giving valuable information away to Hachette’s rivals that causes Livingston to tread carefully. When celebrity rights auctions and acquisitions take place, it may be that more than one division of Hachette is in the running. So while most information is shared freely between divisions, Chinese walls come into play vis-à-vis celebrity-related insight. 

There is less need for discretion when discussing the genre reports that group insight puts together, covering categories such as crime, cookery and science fiction/fantasy. Produced in a magazine format, they contain genre-specific information on consumer behaviour, market analysis and likely future trends. Proposed Hachette book covers are also extensively tested, with designers briefed on the findings. Did you know, a cookbook with prepared food on its cover is far more likely to sell than one displaying raw ingredients? 

“Most of the things we do are in-house,” says Livingston. “That said, when I employ people I always look for agency experience. I want people who can write solid questionnaires, I want people who know how to analyse data and for whom insight is really important. What makes them tick are those ‘a-ha’ moments, and bringing people information that will help them in their jobs.” 

Hachette has developed a data partnership with its media agency, Total Media, through which its segments are tagged to the TGI database to make media buying more effective. As well as making use of social media listening tools, group insight analyses sales and other internal data, such as that generated by Hachette websites. Livingston and her team also look at TV listings information, music sales and app data to understand what is “vibing” in the broader market.  

“Publishing is a fantastic industry and we have incredibly talented people, but you need to look around to find out what is going on,” she says.

Category trends

“There are global trends happening that will hit the UK. There are TV shows that are doing very well – and it’s not just about rushing off and publishing a book on the latest top TV programme; it’s also about seeing where trends are headed, category trends. Is it all film noir and dark crime? Where is that going? Or is it The Great British Bake Off-type stuff? Tracking that kind of thing is really important.”  

Interestingly, Hachette’s segmentation covers everybody, not just book buyers. It includes a ‘Lost Generations’ segment: basically young boys who don’t read and have no passion for reading. Rather than treating this group as a lost cause, Livingston pushed for the business to consider leveraging IP in an innovative way. The upshot is the development of New Star Stories, an app that fuses the New Star Soccer game for mobile phones with content written by a Hachette author. Currently at the beta stage, what makes this app different is that ‘tween’ users read it on a mobile or tablet device and, at key points in the plot, have to play a game – the outcome of which determines what happens next in the story.  

An app and website project that is further advanced is Belgravia, by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. Published in weekly instalments – much as some of Charles Dickens’ greatest work originally appeared – the period novel is packed with interactive content. 

“This is a really great example of insight for innovation. The idea for this came from research – partly mine,” says Livingston. “In doing the segmentation project – for which we interviewed people about their reading habits – we found that they wanted bitesize content, and that 40% of book readers craved a serial to follow.” 

Around 50 consumers helped develop the Belgravia concept with Fellowes, in a co-creation forum referred to internally as a longitudinal blog. They not only helped with beta testing the app, but also influenced how much extra rich content went into it – for example, background information on locations and famous people. On the day of the app’s launch, in April, more than 20,000 people visited the website. 

Pertinent questions

Clearly, Hachette is not paying lip service to innovation; it’s taking a fresh approach in a sector not always known for breaking the mould.   

In a recent interview with Impact, Waterstones’ managing director, James Daunt, criticised the industry for “genuflecting” at the altar of Nielsen and choosing data that provides the answers or excuses wanted. What does Livingston make of that? “I agree with him,” she says, cheerfully. “You shouldn’t just use one methodology or rely on a consumer research project that every other person has got. Often it is cheaper to do it yourself. You can ask more questions pertinent to your business and you have something the competition doesn’t have. 

“As for spinning data – or using it to support the decision for a result someone wants to have – any insight team worth its salt should be able to cut through that and make sure people use data properly. You do training to help them understand how to read it, and you make sure you present so it cannot be skewed.” 

There you have it – chapter and verse, from the world of publishing.