Separating the men from the boys: Summit Media launches ESQUIRE

Friday, 11 November 2011 02:35

Written by Resti Reyes. Jr.

In one fell swoop, Liza Gokongwei-Cheng creates her own best competitor and carves out the next niche in her publishing empire. Known in the marketing industry as a flanking brand move, the introduction of another brand is usually designed to defend the flagship brand from competition by drawing competitive attacks unto itself, and away from the main brand. This is best exemplified by previous new product introductions made by San Miguel Corporation with respect to their beer division, and their flagship product, San Miguel Pale Pilsen. Brands like Red Horse and Gold Eagle were “fighting brands” created to protect SMB Pale Pilsen from the likes of Beer Hausen, Manila Beer, Max Premium Beer, Carlsberg and Budweiser. An interesting sub-development to this is that after a while, the flanking brands became quite strong on their own, and were kept alive long after Carlsberg and Budweiser had died. And so Asia Brewery developed their own flanking brand to challenge them - this is why they had a brand like “Beer na Beer” – which also became quite strong on its own and actually challenged San Miguel Pale Pilsen for market share.

Ah, but we digress… Going back to Esquire, its introduction gives Summit Media a “fighting brand” to defend their best-selling men’s title, “FHM” from the many upstarts that keep coming up to challenge it for readership and circulation supremacy. FHM – officially, For Him Magazine, but also known as For Horny Men, according to one local sexy starlet, has dominated the market niche called men’s magazines for more than a decade. It has had many challengers in the past, and all have failed miserably to wrest the market away from what has become the definitive “Men’s Magazine” – in other words, it had achieved that enviable position of becoming the iconic brand that represents an entire market segment. And as we had said before, with success come competitors and imitators.
Among the more serious challengers were:

1.    MAXIM, published by the rival Lopez Group, which folded up about two years ago;
2.    Pump Magazine, an initiative of Eric Ramos, the former editor-in-chief of FHM;
3.    Playhouse, the plaything of a fairly famous adman, and published by Atlas (the same people who publish a women’s magazine, as well as owners of the National Bookstore chain;
4.    Red, a poorly produced, short-lived, mostly photo-laden thin attempt to make a fast buck – by the publishers of the tabloid Buy-and-Sell;
5.    and of course, the equally short-lived Philippine edition of Playboy.

With varying degrees of affinity to pornography, all these other titles, along with many more not worth mentioning, as they can be downright porn trash, have invariably failed to capture the imagination of Manila’s men-folk. Year after year, FHM reigned supreme.

But the real challenge to FHM in our view was not coming from other titles. The real issue was how to address the slowly aging population of its loyal readers.
FHM had in the past been derided as a “laddie mag” – that’s British English for a boy’s read – looked down upon by the more mature publications in the men’s magazine genre, principally Playboy and Penthouse. The Urban Dictionary defines it as, “Men's magazine catering to oversexed brain-dead morons and featuring double-extra-soft porn (no actual nudity), gadgets, sports, cars and beer.”

In any case, it was clear that, eventually, FHM’s readers would grow up. Or at least grow older. Either way, they would outgrow FHM. After all, how much “teasing” can a boy take?

Eric Ramos, the most well-known former editor-in-chief of FHM used to tell us stories about how he and his publisher would have endless arguments about how much skin he could show in the pictures he would choose for inclusion in each and every issue. His boss would count how many nipples were being exposed for every issue. And always making sure no two of them would appear at the same time in the same photo, if they happened to belong to the same (sexy) female model/talent/whatever.

But now the answer to the real challenge has been made clear: another marketing concept, “market segmentation” takes over. What does that mean? It is simply the creation of a segment in the market where there was none before. In this case, the creation of a segment of male readers growing out of the “mababaw” level of media content offered by the “laddie mags”. As the readers of FHM grew older, they had no alternative titles to turn to. Some car buffs would go for C! – the definitive local automotive magazine. But what about those who do not fancy cars?

Esquire presents a true and viable alternative for the loyal readers of FHM who are beginning to slowly outgrow the not-so-soft porn flavor of their favorite barbershop read. Esquire separates the men from the boys.

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