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Meredith: Thanks to Good Marketing Information, Meredith Knows Women

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Meredith: Thanks to Good Marketing Information, Meredith Knows Women
You may not recognize the name Meredith Corporation but you have certainly heard of the magazines it publishes. Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Family Circle are some of its oldest and best-known titles. Meredith has been publishing magazines for more than 100 years and maintains many top-ten titles, both by category and overall. With a total of 21 subscription magazines, Meredith is also the creator of American Baby, Parents, Fitness, Midwest Living, and MORE. This powerhouse publisher also produces 150 special interest publications – the kind that are available only at retail outlets. Meredith’s magazines have a combined circulation of 30 million – …show more content…

Most companies have no idea how to process and handle all that information. But Meredith effectively puts it all into one place so that managers throughout the company can access it.
Beyond gathering information from internal sources, Meredith also conducts marketing research. Online and traditional surveys allow Meredith to dig deeper into attitudinal information. One of the focal points is questions about customers’ life events. “Are you having a baby, are your kids about to go to school, are your oldest kids about to graduate, are you thinking about retiring?” explains Cheryl Dahlquist, director of database marketing services at Meredith. “As much as we can, we’d like to know that information because we feel like those are the things that influence really what’s happening with someone.” Knowing a single life event can tell a lot about a person’s needs and wants. But possessing updated information on dozens of life events for a given person becomes very powerful.
All the information in the world means little unless you can make sense of it. Meredith is as skilled at analyzing and using database information as it is collecting it. Through complex statistical analysis, Meredith learns about each customer’s interests and how those interests evolve throughout the customer’s life. Through a concept Meredith calls “passion

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