Thinking for yourself: How insight fuels The Economist

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In the battle for attention, often what it takes to stand out is something simple. Amid the hustle and bustle of New York City, a digital billboard with a red background playfully asks the reader to ‘Paint the town read’. Perhaps looking to raise the brow of a discerning news consumer, another reads ‘For fact’s sake’.

The adverts are part of The Economist’s push to expand its readership in the United States and bring the current affairs magazine to life with an American audience. The campaign also hints at its tagline: ‘Independent journalism for independent thinking’.

When I catch up with Seema Hope, global head of consumer research at The Economist, at the publisher’s London headquarters, she talks about the challenge of capturing that independent mindset from the perspective of attracting new subscribers. “Having curiosity and independent thinking is what attracts people to the brand,” she says.

“We know that we make a difference in people’s careers and their conversations – but it’s really difficult to get that across in a marketing message.

“Yes, we appeal to a certain demographic, but it is also the mindset, which is really hard to find from a marketing perspective.”

When our interview takes place, Hope is one year into the job and has been focusing her efforts on how research can inform and help fulfil the publisher’s ambitions, in what is undoubtedly a crowded media landscape.

As home to around half of The Economist’s subscribers, America is a big part of that ambition. “The US is our biggest market; it’s where we see the biggest growth in the short term,” says Hope.

Of the US campaign, Nada Arnot, executive vice-president of marketing at The Economist, says: “Research has been a critical thread throughout the entire campaign – from audience research and value proposition validation to creative testing and measurement of impact with brand lift studies and brand trackers.”

It’s not just the US, though. “We have ambitions to grow everywhere – it’s the top strategy,” says Hope. “It’s a simple message we can all get behind: growth. Everybody is working towards that.”

Hope heads up consumer research, looking after the brand and working mainly with the marketing team. Her team has been established to be the voice of the consumers who come to The Economist via subscriptions.

Sitting within the data division, the consumer research team consists of five employees, including one researcher in the US, which Hope says is useful for keeping the team from being too UK-centric. “We need to make sure we don’t just have a UK lens – even for things like language if working on a global survey. Head office is in the UK, but our consumers are all over the world, so we can’t just think in pounds and what the UK consumer thinks.”

The team analyses all aspects of the subscription process, from people joining at the top of the funnel to those cancelling their service. User experience (UX) research is also part of the team. Of the setup, she says: “UX, market research and data can be in siloes, and one doesn’t know what the other one is up to – but what I love about what we’ve got here is that it’s all in one division.”

Listening closely

To paywall, or not to paywall? That is the question on the mind of many publishers, but not for The Economist. With the principle of never giving its journalism away freely, The Economist publishes the majority of its content behind a paywall and has 1.158 million subscribers globally.
In 2023, the publisher went a step further and launched a paid subscription model for audio, Podcasts+, making most of its podcasts – including weekly shows on global affairs and series such as Boss Class, a podcast on management – only accessible behind a paywall.

Research heavily informed the launch of the paywall because podcast data is infamously sketchy. While The Economist knew it wanted to rethink its podcast model, it needed to understand the experience that users would have, and what copy would resonate with them in communicating the new subscription offer.

It also had to establish the basics, such as pricing strategy. With scant other paywalled podcasts from which to learn, and a complex podcast platform ecosystem, research was essential in getting the new proposition off the ground.

“It involved a huge research programme,” says Hope, of the work that began shortly after she joined the organisation. “It’s really hard to have a full understanding of our podcast universe because of the platforms involved, and there isn’t a single point of measurement – nothing consistent – so we were already up against a few challenges.

“But we feel really strongly about the content being so strong. Everything else we do, we put a value on. It was time to start thinking about our podcasts... they are expensive to produce.”

The business needed to learn a lot in a short period of time – the research began in January 2023, with the podcast subscription launching in October. The work involved qual, quant and UX research, as well as analysing behavioural data around how people consume the podcasts.
With audio being a literal voice in the listener’s ear, it’s quite an intimate medium, so the research examined the feelings people had about the experience. “It’s a personal relationship with our hosts, and that’s something you don’t necessarily get through other media,” says Hope.

The research also discovered how a listener’s attention dips in and out when a host changes tone, or when marketing messages kick in. Hope explains: “Industry has done so much in terms of how the brain processes digital marketing and advertising, but we had to learn very quickly about how to market our own brand within podcasts and how to talk about it, so research was involved in all of those aspects.”

Early ideas about how The Economist would paywall were translated into very early prototypes trialled with consumers. The research team then fed back to others in the business about what made sense and what didn’t, and made recommendations. One of the observations Hope’s team made, for example, was that it is very difficult to explain the mechanics of a paywall through audio.

“We wanted to get across a new concept to listeners, but we discovered that you have to be really succinct with sentences, because the brain zones out as soon as consumers start thinking ‘this is a marketing message’. So, we had to think carefully about what information we should talk to people about.”

This included using the ‘show notes’ that accompany a podcast episode, which the team discovered was a useful mechanism for communication.
“If you’re sending out an email, you can explain why you’re doing it and people can choose to read it or not, but at least it’s there,” says Hope. “With audio, it felt like we needed to change the way we talk about what we’re about to do.”

The research involved testing a message with consumers that was focused on the value of The Economist’s journalism and supporting it. But even before that was put to participants, they “spontaneously” mentioned understanding the need to put a value on content, says Hope. “Once that was fed back to editorial, they were able to tweak the message. It doesn’t mean everyone’s going to pay for it, but we were able to get the right tone across.”

As well as tone, insight work helped to inform pricing strategy and direction for the publisher’s internal specialists, in the absence of anchors in the rest of the market.

UX research also played a big role, because podcast listeners access their content via multiple streaming platforms, such as Spotify, and there was work to be done to explain how subscribers should link their account. “We knew we were putting something in front of consumers that wasn’t necessarily going to be easy,” says Hope. “In the end, most people were able to link their account quite easily, but research helped to know what information was needed to hold people’s hands through the process.”

The other outcome of the podcast work was that everyone in Hope’s team was involved in it, and it helped to establish the research team in a new way of working – one that is focused on partnerships.

Lateral thinking

From an insight perspective, 2023 was a year of setting up a lot of new initiatives, laying the groundwork and “getting the basics right”, according to Hope. This included the launch of a new brand tracker and partnering with a panel provider – Fuel Cycle – to launch its own panel for the first time, for example. Now, the focus is on “accelerating and making it actionable”.

Another of Hope’s priorities is to work in a way that is ‘horizontal’ across the business. “It’s a real focus that everyone in the team needs to have conversations horizontally. We’re not just researchers working in a silo on a project; it has to be connected to other things,” she says.

What that may look like, for example, is one of the UX researchers being embedded into the product design life-cycle, depending on what product designers are working on that quarter. Similarly, one of the members of Hope’s team is dedicated to retention marketing research and understanding the full journey subscribers take, working hand in hand with the retention marketing team.

This approach is a relatively new way of working for the business, but one that Hope thinks is paying off so far, and it allows the team to identify trends or insights that may resonate elsewhere. “Being a small team is great, because we all know what everyone is working on. We meet every day and everything is updated on Slack. We can say ‘that’s interesting that you’ve said that video’s important in acquisitions marketing – I’m also working on video on UX’. We don’t just have one report that goes out.”

Hope, who spent 15 years at Dennis before The Economist, is an advocate of spending time away from your desk, learning about the subject area in which you are working – and having self-determination as a researcher.

“Being a client-side researcher now, you have to be a jack of all trades. You have to be commercial as well [as having research experience]. For example, I’ll organise some training courses – forget you are a researcher for the day; this is everything you need to understand about subscription marketing. And then start thinking about where the research comes in – you can then apply research to ideas that make sense to your stakeholders internally and speak the same language.

“We can’t rely on marketing coming to us and saying ‘this is what we want to find out’ – we have to be in their world, as well as being good with data. We have dashboards coming out of our ears, but if you don’t understand what the data is saying, or what impact that has, it’s going to be difficult to be a researcher and say ‘these are the things I can help you [with, to]understand why the data is showing this’.”

Are there times when UX research challenges a market research finding? “Yes, I’d expect it to,” says Hope. “People might tell us through a survey that something is important to them, but UX will show it in a different light.”

Video is one example of this – survey and behavioural data might indicate that video engagement is high, but readers might report, via the panel, that it doesn’t interest them, as they prefer other formats.

“Data shows us video is growing and engagement is really strong, but – there is a ‘but’, which is where the research comes in, and that is that there is no single finding: it is more nuanced. That’s where the UX comes in – to identify where someone might have wanted to click, but didn’t, or they did and it didn’t quite match their expectations, for example.”

The team is also doing UX work with some of the brand’s younger audiences, looking at where they consume its video – how they watch it on the go is “very, very different”, says Hope.

These approaches help the team’s conversations to be multidisciplined and encourage challenge, says Hope. “It’s absolutely encouraged.”

Another priority is branching out in terms of who it speaks to for its research. The Economist has a “very engaged audience” – “we will ask them questions, they’ll tell us what they think and they don’t hold back” – but Hope is looking at how tech can help reach new audiences for research. Using WhatsApp, for instance, and integrating that with survey data, as well as revisiting qual. This could be students, for example, who might find the tone of a researcher too professional.

Hope says: “We need to be more innovative about how we talk to different audiences that aren’t necessarily receptive to wanting to tell us what they think. We can’t assume our panellists are the voice of everyone.”