How not to sell The Economist

The Economist, the business magazine, optimised its face-to-face subscription sales in the UK by shocking people with PR activities based on the magazine's own articles.

Campaign details

Brand: The EconomistClient: The EconomistAgency: Sense

Summary

How can £10,000 buy a brand an always-on global campaign, thousands of new users with a lifetime value of millions, a new internal department, and, if they're lucky, a shiny APG award?

By selling less.

This paper describes how we helped The Economist optimise their face-to-face subscriptions activity by turning-off people who were seduced by the brand's offer even when it wasn't right for them.

It also describes what we did with the people who were left over, the ones who weren't pushed away...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands