We are even successful being number two.

This man believes in letting his words speak for his work. Just 36 years old, Maheshwer Peri, president and publisher, The Outlook Group, belies a maturity far beyond his years as he commandeers the group.

Peri started his career as an investment banker. A chartered accountant by profession, he is also a qualified management accountant and company secretary. Since he took over in 1998, The Outlook group has successfully launched a magazine on travel, personal finance, a city magazine and the books division, besides launching 'Outlook Business' and International edition 'Newsweek'.

In a freewheeling conversation with Ananya Saha of agencyfaqs!, Peri speaks his mind, be it his objection to methodologies used by the readership surveys or how he makes his rival group react to his actions.

Edited Excerpts

The last 10 years have been fantastic. We are glad that we have almost achieved the goal that we had set for ourselves at the time of the launch. However, there is always a gap between the target and the achievement.

We never intended or planned to be the market leader, instead we wanted to be the opinion leader, and we have proved that we are the opinion leaders because whenever Outlook comments on any subject, people do react to it.

Our greatest success has been that even being the No.2, we make the market leader react to all our actions. And the day, the No.1 player stops reacting, we will be a failure.

For instance, the day we announced the launch of Outlook Business, the number one player announced the revamping of its business magazine, Business Today. And now the current issue of the magazine claims a new, improved version.

Similarly, I am sure that the day we launch Marie Claire, the first reaction will come from Cosmopolitan.

So if the market leader gets shaken by our action, we can certainly claim to be successful, even being the No.2.

And if I don't make them do this, I have failed. That's important for me.

No. It’s the other way round. The No.1 player is accepting the fact that they have a serious challenger to fight with.

We adopted a similar strategy for 'Newsweek'. We have priced the magazine at Rs 25 for the subscribers and at an invitation price of Rs 50 for readers who buy it from the stands. This makes it accessible for the common readers even. On the contrary, the rival group publication sells a similar title at Rs 75. Now again they will have to react on this price war.

Why should we? We have always done what we have felt is the right strategy. We started with Outllook as a weekly, and we did it because everywhere in the world weekly magazine were doing better that the fortnightly ones. It was also logical because news moves fast, and one which can keep pace with it always turns out to be a winner. As a result, even ‘India Today’ which was a fortnightly then, had to shift to a weekly frequency.

Similarly when we launched 'Outlook Money', it was because there weren’t any personal finance magazines then. There were magazines on stock markets, and then there were business magazines. But none of them talked about the common readers’ personal finance. We were the ones to start this genre.

Again, when we launched 'Outlook Traveller', there were lifestyle magazines, and then there were also entertainment magazines. But there wasn’t any travel magazine as such. After our launch, it was the market leader, who had to revamp its magazine India Today Plus as India Today Travel Plus. So you see, we do not react, they do it.

While Outlook Traveller is a clear leader in its genre, Outlook Money is also a leader in its own niche segment.

But in the IRS and NRS surveys, Outlook Money is slotted among the other business magazines such as Business Today or Businessworld. But it’s a personal finance magazine which covers subjects such as retirement planning, wealth management, insurance, mutual funds, taxation, etc. The problem with IRS and NRS is that they do not recognise niche genres.

Had Outlook Money been a business magazine, why would we launch another business magazine Outlook Business?

'Outlook Money' sells around 1,50,000 copies every fortnight, without us spending a penny on its promotion. Then how can one say that the title is not growing.

I fail to understand the way these readership surveys compile data. ‘Outlook Money’ has a huge base of circulation in smaller cities such as Ahmedabad, Indore, Puneand Lucknow, where consumers thrive on saving instruments. And it is beyond my understanding as to how they fail to capture the readership in these cities. It is a layman's magazine.

We are not fools to print more copies when it’s not being sold. And if then we are growing in terms of numbers of copies, our readership numbers should also grow. We are quite satisfied with the circulation figures of all our magazines.

Yes, I would still have a problem with the way they capture data. I am on the governing board of IRS, and I know people on the NRS council, but besides that, there is a basic problem that both IRS and NRS have in capturing data for niche magazines and genres, and that has to be recognised.

What I mean to say is that these readership surveys need to mend their ways of capturing the readership data. Maybe they need more specialised and scientific tools for capturing data.

If you ask people in Delhi who read 'Outlook Money', it is possible that out of 1 million newspaper readers, only one per cent is reading my magazine. Now how do you get to capture that one per cent? If they sample 500 people in Delhi, out of which only 5 people are reading my magazine, and they report only two, about 60 per cent of my readership is lost just like that. And with the kind of money they pay their people who collect the data, claiming 2.5 lakh as the sample size is simply impossible. They really have to pull up their socks and start claiming authenticity to the data they collect.

No, nothing like that. The feel that the magazine gives is very tactile. It's a media vehicle which you can read wherever you want, however you want, and when you want. The approach of the magazine is more researched, it covers the entire key happenings over the week or over a fortnight. I don't think magazines will ever lose its readers because of TV or Internet. You will have more fragmentation among TV and Internet users in comparison to magazine readers.

There will be ups and downs, the way IRS and NRS claim, but the market of magazines is ever-growing.

The growth will happen both vertically as well as horizontally. While on the one hand, we need to keep growing in the genres we are currently operating in, we also need to get into other genres and launch more titles.

We launched three new titles within two months – 'Newsweek', 'Outlook Business', 'Marie Claire', which implies a big growth for the group.

Our aim is to become one of the biggest magazine publishing groups in the country and one could see lots of action for this group now. By the end of 2007, Outlook is sure to own at least 15 titles, many of which could be international. And we would also not like to just limit ourselves to magazines.

Nothing of this sort. There are ways of doing it and ways of not doing it. When we launched 'City Limits', we named it 'Delhi City Limits'. We did not call it 'Outlook City Limits'. There are two kinds of magazines in our portfolio.

One is knowledge-based and serious journalism and the other category is in the entertainment space. If we launch a magazine on films and call it 'Outlook Films', it’s blasphemy. Similarly, we will not launch a magazine for men or women and give it the 'Outlook' brand.

In the knowledge space, whatever titles we have, we will use the 'Outlook' brand.

I am here to ensure that none of the brands suffer, any which ways. The branding and the usage of the brand are so huge that the mother brand can only draw from these things, not suffer. And then, when we attach a piece of information to the brand 'Outlook', we also add credibility to the brand.

For instance, when the numbers of 'Intelligent Investor' were not going anywhere, we did a market survey to understand what exactly happened. We found that some of the speculative magazines in that genre, which usually covered stock markets, had higher credibility in the readers’ mind than 'Intelligent Investor'. And one thing that struck us was that unless you attach a lineage to the product for the information that you provide, you will always have a problem. The day we rechristened 'Intelligent Investor' as 'Outlook Money', our circulation doubled on the newsstands.

It’s happening for the good. There are things that one can do and one cannot do. I will give you an example. A US publisher once came to me and asked if I would publish an Indian version of a journal called 'Yoga'. I was taken aback! Yoga is something we should be doing sitting here. But if I get an option of science and technology, then I will think about it. For me, wherever FDI allows more information to the Indian reader, it should be allowed. No 'Outlook', 'India Today', 'HT', 'TOI', or 'Indian Express' can give you a perspective of what people think of us or what people think of Iran or Afghanistan.

Increasingly, our businesses are getting global. It’s no longer just within India. And when you have that, you should be able to stand up and claim the knowledge, so that you are not taken for granted. And that none of us will be able to do, as our focus is limited to India.

Talking of safeguards, much of the content is already available on the Internet. And it would be foolish to say that Indian publishers will publish any news which can malign the readers. If you are talking about readers getting influenced, then it’s happening anyways through Internet.

Today’s readers can’t be denied access to information.

For us, 'Outlook' does not have a brand manager. Vinod Mehta is the face of our brand. Whatever you see on the magazine is Vinod. Whatever you read on the magazine is Vinod. I just give the support as a publisher and a distributor. My role is not to produce the magazine but to make the magazine available in different markets. I am a business strategist and Vinod is the editor. This is very much clear in our group.

To say, that the magazines are losing readers, is wrong. The average growth, without taking into consideration the IRS and NRS, is still 30 per cent.

The simple reason for increasing the price is inflation. The cost of paper printing, and dispatch has increased. When we price our magazine at Rs 20, we do not even recover 60 per cent of the cost that has gone into printing the magazine. The other option we have is to produce trash content and not have great journalists around me. Or I rather invest in quality people and bring out world-class content. And if I invest in quality people, I have to recover it from somewhere. It’s 'economy'.

It is important not only to burden the advertiser but also the reader, which is what we did. To quote one of the senior media planners from Mindshare, “You need to monetise from every side.” Newspapers are trying to monetise the same only though advertisers, television is trying to cut the quality of content to save money. So, we ask readers and advertisers to pay us more. Our challenge is to deliver the content. We have increased the number of edit pages already by 10 percent after increasing the cover price.

It might be possible. These are issues that we keep reviewing periodically, but nothing has been decided so far. Right now, my limited responsibility is to make 'Outlook' the largest magazine publishing group in the industry. May be two years down the line, Rajan Raheja asks me to launch a newspaper, then we will consider that too.

Becoming a conglomerate is not an unhealthy trend. It's just that at some point, there will be a consolidation in the industry with the smaller players selling out to the bigger players, who in turn will sell out to much bigger players.

Jagran group’s Channel 7 has been taken over by CNN-IBN, and these things will keep happening. But when you set out an objective and move in a right way, you can only keep growing. In the case of 'Outlook', I am not thinking of anything other than magazine publishing right now, and if we see a better magazine publisher, we will just try to outdo them.

There are two ways of looking at it. One is strategic, and the second is non-strategic, which is of a financial investor. I don't believe in financial investing, which would mean cutting into each other pockets. But strategically it is possible that two or three people come together and strengthen a group. When TV18 acquired Channel 7, it was a good move because, they did not have a Hindi channel. Instead of launching a Hindi channel themselves, they acquired a stake in an existing Hindi channel.

When we were planning to launch a business magazine, we also looked at the possibility of buying out an existing brand. It's always easier because instead of trying to create a market for two different magazines, it would be better to acquire one magazine, which is already set-up.

Without naming, yes we were looking for players. Because at some time, consolidation will happen within the business magazines as there is too much of fighting within the same space. But we were waiting for our own time and now the time has come, so we thought of launching the product ourselves.