Hindustan Times emphasises "people"

In a shift from its number-centric ad strategy, north India’s largest-selling English paper, Hindustan Times, talks about the quality of its readership

Sabil Francis

agencyfaqs!

NEW DELHI

While selling a newspaper to both consumers and media planners, it's generally numbers that make the most convincing argument.

But after having stolen a march over its nearest rival, The Times of India (TOI), Delhi's largest-selling newspaper, The Hindustan Times (HT), is focusing on the quality of its readership, rather than the number of people reading the paper. Take the advertising for the Persona supplement for women - that shows a modern young woman in her home. It's clear that it's the people and not the numbers that count. "HT sells 138,000 copies more than TOI, so we need not play on the numbers game. Our message is that more Sec A people read HT," says a senior member of the creative team at HTA, that has crafted the new campaign for the newspaper.

According to the latest Indian Readership Survey (IRS), in Sec A, HT has 6.04 lakh readers, against 5.2 lakh for TOI. The latest National Readership Survey (NRS) puts HT's Sec A readership at 6.43 lakh, versus 4.95 lakh for TOI. And, according to the NRS, in Sec A+, HT has 2.67 lakh readers versus TOI's 2.31-lakh figure. The latest ABC figures show that both the papers have gained in circulation. HT's total circulation is 7.77 lakh, up from 5.66 lakh, in 1998. TOI has 6.4 lakh, up by one lakh. Quite evidently, HT has more than doubled its marginal circulation over TOI in the period between 1998-2000. The gain in readership (for both papers) comes after half a decade of pitched battles where price was king.

The surge at HT has not worried the TOI, claim senior sources at the newspaper. As one of them smugly puts it, "We cover India." HT is trying to cut into the market share of the TOI, but at the same time, is trying to project a new image. "The idea behind the recent advertisements is to target a new kind of people - the creative class, the intellectual kind," says a senior member of the advertising team at HTA.

The aim of the campaign is to stress that HT is different. However, the localisation - or, as critics would put it, the ‘tabloidization' of the English newspaper that the TOI pioneered - seems to be here to stay. While trying to polish the paper, the editorial team at HT also knows that what sells is glossy news. "We are looking at the market of upper middle class professionals. And we think that the best way to capture them would be to write something that is catching, and yet is not tabloidish," reveals a journalist at HT.

But the questions is, given the changed dynamics of readership patterns, is circulation a function of edit quality or that of pricing? After all, the price cutting tactics that TOI indulged in did payoff for the paper. And changed the rules of the Indian newspaper industry.

TOI, at the start of the 1990s, had a circulation of about 70,000 in Delhi. By 1998, was selling close to 5.46 lakh (a little over half a million), just 20,372 lower than HT's estimated circulation. Analysts say that TOI managed to narrow the gap between itself and HT mainly due to a price cut in 1994, when TOI's cover price was reduced from Rs 2.30 to Rs 1.50. TOI's circulation shot up, at the expense of the HT, according to most analysts.

Interestingly, TOI's tactics was widely reviled, but avidly copied, by most Indian newspapers. And in two years, between 1996 and 1998, overall newspaper circulation increased by 42 per cent. Contrast this to the growth between 1987-96: a slow 50 per cent.

Of course, the sudden growth in newspaper readership does not mean that revenue has also gone up. Though the number of daily newspapers (including vernacular newspapers) has gone up by more than 15 times since 1952 - an average growth of 5 per cent a year for the industry - advertising revenue has been falling. In 1991, it was 68 per cent, while, in 1998, it had dropped to 55 per cent. In sharp contrast, the share of television revenue has grown from 19 to 35 per cent. The Internet is also expected to cut into advertising revenues, especially in such areas like job or appointment advertisements. A recent report says that in 1998-99 there was a decline in appointment ads for all newspapers.

Which could explain why papers have started talking of quality of readership over quantity. After all, marketers are looking at consumers with the ability and inclination to purchase - not a faceless mass of humanity. Or a set of numbers.

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