Henry V fought at Agincourt knowing his strengths, the landscape, his enemy’s strategic plans, and tactical competencies of each of his battle groups.

He adopted an early form of “benchmarking”: well-trained men-at-arms on the international chivalric model; disciplined missile troops far beyond mercenary competency; a small, manageable command structure compared to the individualistic model used by the French.

Publishers need to benchmark in the same way. England punched above its weight and now you can do the same!

Effective benchmarking for publishers

Which of your competitors do you admire? Put another way, which of your competitors is/are getting up your nose? If you’re a big player, it’s probably a small operation taking out core niches of your business. If you’re a small player, you’re probably looking at the models of more established publishing brands.

The point is, to benchmark do not obsess yourself with people you think are your competitors, but look at best practice and develop yours to similar standards – or better.

What to benchmark? Brands don’t develop on product alone. Look at Amazon – they’ll sell anything to anyone but their brand is based on one aspect: customer service. So, if you have a website, benchmark delivery against Amazon. If you want to know how to run newsletters and B2B subscription services profitably, look at Informa. If you want to know about branded books for the trade, study Wiley’s Dummies series.

How to gather benchmarking data for your publishing business

But don’t just look and copy. Get objective data where possible:

• Management reports on your segment
• Industry association surveys (e.g. PA, PPA or SIPA)
• Surveys by suppliers to the industry (e.g. Vista/Publishing Technology)
• Networking among your peers at PPA, SIPA, PA and other events; be open with others and they will be open with you (within reason, of course)

Of course, a key source of data though is your customer database. If you are a trade-based publisher, this is problematic because your customers (the bookshops) can only tell you what sells. They can’t tell you why they sell, why things don’t sell etc. Yes, the trade can tell you how your service compares to other trade publishers but ultimately you need to talk to your customers. They are unlikely to want to help you with substantive market research.

With a customer database publishers can:

• Validate data by recency, frequency, purchasing trends and financial value
• Contact by mail via mail surveys (still one of the most valid methods, even today)
• Contact via email with simple questions or links to online survey systems
• Contact via Phone
• Contact face to face
• Organise focus/discussion groups via a third party

Using the data you can question customers on key variables you wish to discuss: customer service; pricing; order delivery times and more.

Today, online forums and networking sites are also a great way to track customer feedback. Use sites such as LinkedIn to post questions; set up Twitter pages, blogs, etc. Or just do it the old fashioned way – cards in the backs of books so you can gather names and addresses.

Using benchmark data to change the way your publishing company works

Once you have gathered the data you need to benchmark your publishing business against the best, what do you do with it? There are four outcomes from your findings:

1. You are working below industry par and you need to act
2. You are already operating at best practice levels
3. You are operating above best practice
4. You are in a new industry with limited benchmarking

Excluding example 4, you now need to compare competitors against your findings and then seek to resolve so that you are either on a par or better than your benchmarked companies.

Outside the remit of this article is then the management of change within your company to deliver brand-leading solutions for your publishing business. These tasks will fall within standard project management considerations.

Some considerations before deciding to change your publishing business following a benchmarking programme.
As with all things, never take what you see or hear at face value:

• when assessing your findings consider alternatives and be prepared to measure and test against variables for objective analysis
• anticipate that your benchmarked competitors may change and think how they might do that
• understand why your competitors might operate like they do (this could conceal things you have not thought about
• uncover how your competitors work internally on issues such as marketing, sales, pricing, product delivery, financing npd, not forgetting how businesses are being managed

The management of competitive intelligence in publishing companies

Finally, in an environment where you are gathering competitor data for benchmarking purposes, consider where your findings should be held or retained. In many publishing companies, marketing is seen simply as a department for distributing brochures and catalogues.

In truth, competitor activity should be monitored and delivered by product managers within a strategic marketing department or, in larger organisations, by a specific competitor intelligence team.

Competitor data is too important to be the preserve of individual publishers, sales directors, or a managing director. Competitor data is a function of strategic marketing and should reside under the marketing function of a business, being openly distributed for the development and delivery of strategic (as opposed to product specific) goals.

This article was written by Michael Smith, Director, Red Page Ltd.
Read more about strategic marketing for publishers
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