In 2015, Condé Nast International will begin tackling the ecommerce platform as a means to sell goods to readers of its magazines, which includes industry leading players as Vogue, GQ, Wired and The New Yorker. These publications are already sold in more than 30 countries, with digital editions that attract monthly web traffic of ~250m users. This is quite a database of customer information and analytics just waiting to be further leveraged by the company.
With the building of a commerce division, Conde Nast is catching up with other pure ecommerce players in the same effort: to bridge content and commerce. Catalogues as a standalone business entity doesn't make sense anymore. The key is now in developing lasting relationships with the readers and knowing what the readers want. Customer is still the king.
According to Franck Zayan, president of ecommerce, Condé Nast International, “Ideally anything presented in magazines should be able to be purchased. We’re talking about hundreds, thousands of products. If we bring commerce to Condé Nast it means commerce should resemble Condé Nast. We’re not talking about fashion only. It’s beauty, high tech, travel – a very wide range of products. It’s a very large number of categories that should be made available to the readers of the magazines. It should be seen as a service, as something that is brought to the reader as a value-added service.” This is of course something that was inevitable and obviously down the road, but it is still a huge disruptive announcement by the official fashion publication houses to declare.
Regarding his view on print, Zayan says “The problem is not technology, it’s the people. Building a commerce business for a company like Condé Nast, which is really not an ecommerce company to say the least, means we have to build teams able to do this. Building teams means we are actually hiring product people, developers, engineers and UX people.” Zayan is right to mention HR, as it is a huge organizational change to the previous talent pool at the publishing house. Success and failure in the short term depends on how fast the culture of each magazine can adapt and introduce a new line of team members and embrace the technological challenges facing integration with the two platforms.
And ultimately, Zayan says, “Vogue or any of those magazines are not about product per se as in a catalogue but they are about the entertainment behind the possible transaction that will come afterwards. They are about the magic behind the products. So making that connection between that magic of the product and the transaction, that’s the challenge.”
We all eagerly await the next evolution of Conde Nast, which is coming just around the corner. Stayed tuned to 2015.
Source: http://internetretailing.net/2014/10/irc-2014-the-conference-conde-nasts-ecommerce-president-explains-how-the-publisher-will-use-ecommerce/
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