2006 Marketers That Mattered
UNABLE TO SPEND its way to success, HarperCollins has been found new ways to be creative. Marketing, sales and publicity staff includes (clockwise, from top left) Melanie Storoschuk, Shelley Tangney, Rob Firing, Steve Osgoode, Eric Jensen
Photograph: Paul Ferrier
Most of the major breakthroughs in communications technology, including radio, television, prerecorded music, video games and the Internet, have been heralded as inventions that would render books obsolete. However, one need look no further than the 2006 marketing performance by HarperCollins Canada to understand why the medium keeps flourishing amidst the death threats.
Take, for example, Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, a non-fiction account of climate change and its potential repercussions. Skeptics suggested that an unknown author’s book on the environment would be a hard sell, but HarperCollins Canada drove the book to the number-one spot on numerous Canadian bestseller lists, including The Globe and Mail‘s.
Then there is Londonstani, Gautam Malkani’s novel about South Asian teens in a London suburb. Penned by a non-Canadian, first-time author, Londonstani was an unlikely candidate to hit the Maclean’s bestseller list upon its publication. But the marketing team at HarperCollins Canada made it happen.
It did so with a cash allotment that demands shrewd decisions. “We’ve got thousands and thousands of titles in print, and the budget for any one title is fairly small,” says publicity director Rob Firing.
Unable to spend its way to success, HarperCollins Canada has instead created a culture of innovation. “We’re forced to be creative,” says president and CEO David Kent. “We have to have an atmosphere where people are free to experiment.”
In the past year, experimentation has led to the introduction of online, movie-style trailers to support several titles, as well as a podcast series, called Prosecast, that features authors reading from and speaking about their works. HarperCollins Canada further supported The Weather Makers by printing all marketing materials on recycled paper, while its initiatives on behalf of Londonstani included a graffiti campaign, T-shirts and buttons featuring the book jacket’s logo and partnerships with South Asian clothing and Internet companies.
Derek Weiler, editor of the book industry trade magazine Quill & Quire, says these marketing moves have distinguished HarperCollins Canada from its competitors. “Certainly among the larger companies, they’re a leader,” he says. “They’ve done some things other publishers have been slow to embrace.”
Kent says that such tactics have been years in the making. He describes a 2003 meeting that brought together senior executives from HarperCollins’ worldwide divisions.
“We were challenged with the questions, ‘what are we going to be in five years and how are we going to respond to the dramatic change in the marketplace that came about from technology,’ ” he says. “And we created business models where we were going to devote a significant amount of resources to things that didn’t exist yet.” Thus, as in the case of the podcasts and trailers, the company set about finding marketing applications for some of the very technologies that were supposed to signal its demise.
HarperCollins’ Canadian division has proven especially adept at executing the company’s global vision. Of the 16 countries that published The Weather Makers, for example, Flannery’s native Australia was the only market aside from Canada to make the title a number-one bestseller. Kent says his team’s mix of youth and experience is a key contributor to the success.
“It’s a balance between experience and preconceived ideas on one hand and less experience but no preconceived ideas on the other,” he says. “That’s a very creative mix.”
The creativity of HarperCollins Canada’s in-house marketing team, and the results it generated in 2006, provides an example of survival-by-evolution that other book publishers would do well to study.
