To say the least, it was offputting, beginning with the name, Psychologies. You don’t expect a woman's magazine to be named Psychologies, even if it originated in France.
It also didn’t have the usual women’s magazine stuff, fashion, or the latest in window treatments for the home. It was about what its name implied, the psychology of the reader and the people around her, things internal, featuring articles like “Heal your Past – Change your Future,” and “The Control Freak’s Guide to Letting Go.”
But sometimes in magazines different is good, and for Psychologies it has been good. In stepping beyond the typical women’s magazine, the English version of the French title has seen solid growth in the two and one-half years since its launch, though it's still small. Circulation is up 21.5 percent to 140,162 in the second half of 2007 compared to the same period the year before.
“The concept was so different it was hard to guess how it would do in the UK market. But it has grown from strength to strength, although from a low base,” says Eve Samuel-Camps, deputy director for print at Universal McCann. “It has been successful because it is different from the rest of the market.”
That’s not entirely surprising.
Psychologies has been on the scene for 30 years in France in various guises, and it claims to be the second best-selling women’s monthly magazine at 360,000 copies a month.
In all, there are eight international editions of the magazine in places as far afield as China and South Africa. The UK edition is published by Hachette Filipacchi UK under a licensing agreement with owner Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, and last fall it began distributing the British edition in the U.S. on a small scale.
In the UK, Psychologies targets 25- to 44-year-old women. Surveys show that readers tend to be intelligent and affluent, and that tallies with the readership of the French edition, says Judith Secombe, group publisher of Psychologies and several other titles at Hachette UK.
In addition to its different content, another factor working for Psychologies is its slightly older target audience.
In the UK women’s sector, the field is crowded, indeed overcrowded, with fashion, celebrity and lifestyle magazines targeting younger women, and they're struggling amid the fierce competition.
That's less so for older-skewing titles. “If you are trying to sell magazines to women in their early 20s they are more fickle. An older reader is less likely to be on the internet and worrying about Facebook,” says Secombe.
Advertisers are catching on along with readers, despite an initial wariness over its not-the-norm editorial.
“When [Psychologies] originally came in, it was so unusual not to have fashion that advertisers were unsure about it," says Universal McCann's Samuel-Camps. "But it does really well against that upmarket demographic, so more and more advertisers will go into it."
