A B®AND new magazine

There is already industry buzz around the new monthly business-to-business magazine that launches into the advertising, media and marketing sector next week. BRAND magazine is an independent publication aimed at brand professionals in the corporate, media and advertising business. It is driven by three experienced marketing journalists, with Di Paice, formerly the Cape editor of ADvantage magazine as editor; Herman Manson, editor of online magazine Media Toolbox as deputy editor; and Kim Penstone, formerly editor of the website Marketingweb, as Jo'burg editor.

The editors believe a new category has opened up in the past five years as brands exploded, transformation started affecting company culture and players like government entered into the brand-building business. A pioneering team, they aim to fill that category gap, providing case studies, a novel approach to new markets and a high quality platform to showcase the country's communication arts.

Any jaded journo or editor will tell you that there is something special about a new magazine. The smell of the paper and ink, the feel of glossy new pages, an appreciation for the creative effort, blood, sweat and tears that has no doubt gone into bringing it to its glossy glory.

It looks good, with a quality feel in the gloss, good layout and new editorial treatment of issues out there. Value is also evident in the perfect bound, 48-pager with covers. While advertising is still sparse, its launch issue stories have a strong issue-based, business feel which is sometimes missing from reporting in this industry. The case-study driven approach is also long overdue.

It's high time there was a new spirit in the print business-to-business arena in the creative industries as the decade-old plus ADvantage and Marketing Mix (about 25 years old), whose publishers provide little brand support, are overdue for makeovers.

Then there is the revamp of the MFSA Journal of Marketing, now under the wing of The Future's publishers, who are expected to merge their Future magazine marketing quarterly (which has never really gained the market share it should have, given its high profile editors and contributors) with the MFSA Journal, to provide a whole new marketing offering to the industry following on the rather ignominious demise of the Marketing Federation of Southern Africa.

Although BRAND Editor Di Paice prefers to describe her publication as filling a category gap "somewhere between Fin Week/Financial Mail and ADvantage", it will be selling advertising in the same space as Advantage, Marketing Mix, the MFSA Journal/The Future, as well as Sandra Gordon's The Media magazine. All target the lucrative advertising budgets of the main media owners. So it remains to be seen whether BRAND will grow advertising spend or merely cannibalise from the other publications in this space.

They have a unique editorial strategy and it would be great to see a fresh new advertising strategy come from a B2B publisher that doesn't include bashing your competitors and fighting about the decimal points in the annual ABC's - particularly since everyone uses the same free distributions lists from the list companies!

BRAND will use design as a differentiator and its editorial will be highly focussed, with profiles, branding case studies, one big media story each month, and a showcase of design. Let's hope the full colour DPS spreads last and don't drop to fulfil advertising requirements. We all know it's not easy for the more 'traditional' publishers concerned only with the bottom-line to give away pages to pictures and embrace white space as a worthy design element!

Says Paice: "With the proliferation of brands, a whole new category has opened up in the business-to-business magazine sector and BRAND aims to fill that gap. BRAND launches timeously, as the demise of the Marketing Federation of South Africa is a clarion call to brand professionals to increase the role they play in the national economy. With goods and services making up 69% of our GDP, brand-building and marketing communication must already be a significant economic driver and this power could profitably be harnessed for the development of the country."

And if BRAND's excellent editorial approach is anything to go by, we could see quite a shake-up in this sector in the next 12 months - it feels rather crowded at the moment!