Harvard Business Review Is Experimenting This Year
Harvard Business Review, that staid legacy leadership magazine found across global CEO offices, is experimenting into the future.
From TikTok videos to ads at New York’s Grand Central, HBR is trying new ways to reach its audience, in part because of a slump in traffic from search and social, but also to better appeal to consumers who are inundated with information at every turn. It’s also testing out selling subscriptions B2B rather than just B2C to broaden its reach.
On top of that, the nonprofit is building out a C-suite offering that will include a weekly newsletter, master classes, playbooks honed in on difficult situations leaders are likely to face, live events and a peer to peer community—details of pricing and participation are still being ironed out.
“We’re in an interesting build phase right now where we’ve identified things that we want to do, and we’re just in execution mode,” Erika Heilman, vice president, deputy publisher at Harvard Business Review, told AMO. “Where we want to be in a year is crystal clear on our primary customer and their needs… but we also hope to continue to serve a broader group of leaders and managers and people entering the workforce with our regular subscription.”
The changes come following the start of Amy Bernstein last month as editor in chief, overseeing editorial content and strategy for HBR, including its flagship magazine, digital platforms, books and events. She took over for Adi Ignatius, who now holds the role of editor at large and will write the weekly C-suite newsletter.
HBR’s already in pretty decent shape:
- Paid circulation: 343,000
- Web visits: 10 million monthly
- Social impressions: 80 million monthly
- LinkedIn followers and members: 14 million monthly
- Twitter followers: 6 million monthly
- Instagram followers: 3 million monthly
- Facebook followers: 6 million monthly
- YouTube followers: 1 million monthly
- Email newsletter subscribers: 1.2 million
- Podcast listeners: over 1 million monthly
- Podcast downloads: 2 million
- Books sold annually: 1.7 million
It’s also profitable, with its parent company, Harvard Business Publishing, seeing revenue of about $304 million annually, any surplus of which goes back to Harvard to fund research.
Its three core businesses are subscriptions, advertising and book publishing, with most revenue coming from subscriptions. The diversity in revenue streams helped when Covid hit in March 2020, and all of its books were returned from the marketplace, while subscriptions and ads went gangbusters.
Online and Off
Harvard Business Review knows its audience wants video, so it’s been experimenting with different formats, including animation as well as short-form videos.
“For a publisher like HBR, how do you learn which formats and which experiences are really going to be valuable to the people that are your super fans, that are the people who really want your content?” Maureen Hoch, editor, HBR.org and vice president of digital content, said to AMO. “Publishers face a huge challenge, where you’re trying to decide where to put your limited resources. We know our audience wants video, and we’re committed to experimenting with that in all kinds of ways.”
It’s not just online, either. It’s trying to reach prospective readers where they are offline. The publication is testing out an out of home ad marketing campaign, in the New York metropolitan area at Grand Central.
“We’re trying to be a little bit more intentional about going to where people are already organized,” Heilman said. “We have an extended partnerships team internally where we look for like-minded communities, and try to see about getting our content in front of them, to try it on for size, and also standing up a B2B sales team.”
That team is selling subscriptions to associations that might lack in content and have very strong networking opportunities, and ideally, can embed the magazine in their membership offering. They are also targeting consulting firms who use their content regularly.
Audience Matters
HBR has always been focused on subscriptions and its readership, but it is rethinking what metrics matter going forward, paying more attention to things like subscriber visits to the site and trying to drive repeat visitors.
“It’s not so much the subscriber file per se, but it’s the quality of that relationship and the lifetime value of having that customer over time that we’re largely focused on,” Heilman said. After all, those readers have been among their best ambassadors.
“This past year, we’ve launched gift articles for subscribers, and we’re always thinking about ways we can help our subscribers share ideas with their team,” Hoch said, adding that word of mouth is still HBR’s most powerful recommendation engine.
The Almighty and All-Coveted C-Suite
C-level executives are scarce on time, and they are being wooed not only by HBR, but also by Semafor, Axios, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal.
“We’re trying to play a sense-making role,” Heilman said. “We need to deliver this in a way that’s very brief and useful. It’s almost like we’re trying to be a guide in that process and really help them solve the problems that are keeping them up at night.”
The C-suite product will include master classes focused on teaching skills and playbooks that will be super specific to particular situations and provide plans to execute against.
“We’ll also have webinars of some sort, some live events that people can participate in and ask questions and be part of a peer to peer community,” Heilman said. “The content bundle that we’re coming out with is going to be available to everyone. It will be a subscription tier that we have, and most people will self-select whether they’re in the C-suite, or whether they’re adjacent, they’re planning to be in the C-suite, or whether they serve the C-suite like an executive coach or even a consultant. We think all of those will benefit from the content package.”
While HBR isn’t known for its events, it is putting thought into how to use them to best engage and retain subscribers both in person and online.
“We don’t do events in as big a way as some of our competitors do, but when we do them, we get great reviews on the programming, people are super engaged,” Heilman said. Their research thus far has shown that C-suite executives in particular prefer smaller, curated events where they can feel some “psychological safety” and try ideas on for size.
“We want to enable that,” Heilman said. “Once we get more subscribers on board for the C-suite, we’ll start to be able to learn more about them. We’ll know where they fit in terms of industries and sectors. We’ll have more ability to sort of curate those smaller groups, probably through an invitation only type of experience.”
Over the next year, HBR hopes to have solidified the ideas that work, including figuring out what works around discoverability with tactics they are playing with.
“Talk to us in a year, and it’ll be a question of how well we’ve executed on the plan,” Heilman said.
Update: HBR corrected the location of its out of home campaign in the ninth paragraph.
