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A consuming passion

27.06.07 Tom Holman

With exhaustive sales data at their fingertips, publishers and booksellers know better than ever before what books are selling and where—but not necessarily why. Getting to grips with what drives readers' tastes and purchases is the theme of The Bookseller's upcoming "Closer to Consumers" conference, and several speakers think efforts to understand shopping habits are long overdue in the books business.

Barry Clark, global account associate director at Future Foundation and formerly in the marketing department of HarperCollins, thinks publishers spend too much time charming a handful of key buyers at the chains and supermarkets, and too little getting to know the people buying their books. "There's always been an impression in publishing that the book trade begins and ends with five or six people," he says.

While acknowledging how sales data from Nielsen BookScan has transformed the industry, he also thinks publishers need to be smarter in their use of it—by pairing it with qualitative consumer research or drilling down to books and genres selling below the radar. "Publishers' interests always seem to be at the top of the bestseller lists, and in the era of the long tail there's more to be gained from looking deeper."

Consumers' changing entertainment and information preferences will be one of the strands of the conference. Keynote speaker Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst at research consultancy Millward Brown, thinks anticipating trends in consumer culture helps to increase the number of books that fly rather than sink. "Publishing will never be a precise science," he says, "but you can reduce your risk and increase your chance of getting a return on your investment."

Hollis compares books to the film industry, where big movies are exhaustively audience-tested and sometimes tweaked to suit consumers' preferences and maximise box-office take. It would be a brave editor who changed a novel's ending to suit readers' tastes, but Hollis thinks more might be done to give the public what it wants. "Movies and adverts are pre-tested with hundreds of people. But books are more like a direct mail business, where hundreds of products are thrown out there while publishers hope for the best."

Working out what influences buyers' decisions in stores is another focus of the conference. Rob Barker, managing director of Shopper Insights, will present a session on the psychology of consumers, and he thinks working out how buyers pick their books is key. "You can look all you like at Epos data, but unless you understand how people are interacting with your book you don't really know what's happening out there." He says publishers also need to understand why buyers walk past potential purchases. "Sales data doesn't tell you about the lost opportunities—you should want to know why people aren't buying your books as much as why they are."

HarperCollins hits target

One publisher making efforts to better understand its readers is HarperCollins, which has just set up a dedicated consumer insight unit. Head of media and insight Catherine Hunt will present the findings of research with its panel of 3,000 readers at the conference, and she thinks publishers' intelligence about buying behaviour is low compared to other media sectors. "We're trying to help people understand the reality of what happens to a book—where it goes, who buys it, where they buy it and why they buy it."

She adds that consumer insight can help editorial and marketing departments to gauge more accurately whether and why a book is likely to work. "Publishers may not have known much about consumers in the past, but good editors have always had an instinct for what's going to work. We're giving our people a framework to make even better decisions and hit the target more often."

HC is also using its consumer research to understand people's use of new technologies—but Hunt thinks that changing channels of delivery matters less than the content that's delivered through them. "Readers might want different formats of books, but there's no indication that they're getting bored of them. What's valuable isn't the paper that we put the book on and between, it's the content—the words."

Clark agrees, pointing out that the books business is already coping far better with the kind of changes in consumer behaviour that have revolutionised the music industry. "If you think of a book as a piece of technology—lightweight, difficult to break, long-lasting, cheap—then there's not much wrong with it. All the gloom about the death of the medium is a bit overstretched. There's still a great thirst for reading and books."

The Bookseller's Closer to Consumers conference will be held at the Royal Society of Arts in London on 12th July. For booking details contact Sally Greetham on 020 7420 6028 or sally.greetham@bookseller.co.uk.

Tom Holman Bookseller Seminar Consumerism

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