Corporate Magazine: Why It’s useful
What is the corporate magazine
Among the tools used today by companies to consolidate the esteem of the public and its attachment to the brand is the company magazine. This medium, also called house organ, is the protagonist in recent years of new fortune and popularity.
The house organ is an editorial product made by a company for information purposes, it is printed continuously with fixed periodicity.
Taking into account the profile of the recipients, the magazine can be distributed free of charge, as in most cases, or it can be sold. The places where it can be found are usually the points of sale or branches of the company itself or its partners. In other cases it is possible to buy the product at newsstands, more rarely in bookshops.
Features
Destined at the company’s choice to different groups of stakeholders, the corporate journal is able to generate a sense of belonging in the public and the recognition of its values in those of the brand. The magazine is also one of the channels that most favor the use of storytelling, therefore an appropriate tool for communicating the history and identity of the brand.
The house organ can be used internally, when it is addressed to company personnel, or externally. In the latter case it is aimed at shareholders, partners or, as in the most frequent case today, the general consumer public.
Today we are witnessing a real spread of company magazines with explicit market purposes, therefore addressed to customers. The magazines distributed to the general public are full of articles and illustrated material. Their purpose is to entertain and inform the reader with topics of interest.
Even in the case of a magazine aimed at consumers, its production reinforces the trust of all the company’s contacts. The distribution of a magazine is always a clear sign of its good health.
By adapting the structure of the magazine, the themes and the tone of the articles to the established target audience, the magazine aimed at the public must primarily transmit:
- History and corporate values;
- Objectives and policies;
It must also inform on:
- Projects and initiatives undertaken;
- Products and services offered;
Advantages of the press as a channel
The effectiveness of the corporate magazine as a tool for brand promotion crosses the theory of the advantages long recognized to the press as a channel to communicate.
These media are capable of transmitting a high amount of data and are therefore called “high-definition”. Their characteristic is the need for less effort on the part of the user to understand the messages.
The printed paper compared to other tools is often consulted several times by the reader. For this reason and others the written text is the medium that has the greatest advantages in relation to reception time.
The print in fact offers the recipient the possibility to choose the most appropriate time for reading. The moment chosen, as is intuitable, is always the one in which its availability and its attention are greater. In front of a written text the user can also manage the time of use at will.
Unlike an audiovideo product in fact, whose viewing and listening times are fixed, a text content can be read more or less quickly, can be interrupted and then resumed. In a written text the process of reading the message is modeled on the attention of the receiver.
The newspaper, it should be added, is one of the means of communication that most easily allows you to select a specific target. This is especially the case for a company journal because it is cut out, both in content and structure, from the profile of the users of reference.
A bit of history
The house organ was born at the end of the nineteenth century and saw the first examples appear in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century. It spreads in our country during the second post-war period, in the years of industrial recovery, that interval that precedes the economic boom.
Initially intended for the information of company personnel, the house organ was made in its early days by the largest companies. Within these realities, in fact, the work was fragmented and the relationships between workers and top management were sparse and distant.
Almost immediately, however, companies understood the importance of the company newspaper in external communication to give fame to their name and their products. Moreover, the history of our country, just during the years of the industrial take-off, has seen the action of various educated and enlightened entrepreneurs.
They were motivated not only by the search for profit but also by the desire to bring improvements to the society in which they lived. Between the end of the ’40s and the beginning of the ’60s many companies produced house organs for the general public.
After a few decades of crisis, linked to the intensification of the workers’ struggles, the company’s periodical press gained ground again and its production remained stable.
The most recent fortune is linked to the birth of the web even if not directly. In fact, the digital network has favored the spread of a new sensitivity in the field of communication strategies. Although the web has offered new opportunities to the birth of information platforms, the largest number of company magazines are in paper format. However, the new sensitivity has encouraged brand promotion strategies linked to the diffusion of user services and entertainment content.