NIEUWEGEIN, the Netherlands — The National Geographic has launched a campaign to define its target universe in Belgium and the Netherlands more sharply.
In the two countries the publication has one of the largest audiences of a foreign language magazine – it is printed in English – as a percentage of population in Europe.
The magazine asked the Wegener Direct Marketing Group to help define the target universe more precisely as one way to assure more cost effective and productive mailings.
The Dutch-based DM company – it has branches in several other European countries – took the member (National Geographic readers are called members rather than subscribers) list and matched it against local databases.
Specifically, Wegener used its Dutch consumer database of 1.2 million names, the Grote Consumenten Database, and Sophie's shopping club, a Belgian list developed by Sopres, a Wegener associated company.
The Sopres file contained the names of 625,000 household responders to the company's bi-annual consumer lifestyle mail questionnaire.
The matching produced media/list selection profiles with clearly differing characteristic in both countries. The scoring models developed from the matching are being considered for use in selecting lists for the magazine's next promotional cycle.
Wegener said it expects to have concrete results in about three months.
