Brief #2: Supermarket Tabloids

Imagine it's 2010 and you are pushing your grocery cart through the aisles of your local supermarket. There is only one or two people in line for register 5, so you roll up behind a lady on her phone with about $200 worth of groceries and a child in her cart. As you settle yourself in line, in your head you say, "This is going to be a while.", roll your eyes, and they land on a boldly titled magazine that reads:

All of a sudden you start to wonder if love was ever real and why life now seems so meaningless. If you were fangirling over Twilight along with the rest of the world at this time, your heart would have dropped and you would have been compelled to pick up this issue to find out why. Seeing this today, however, would have practically no meaning realizing that the last movie of the series debuted 6 years ago and the very first movie celebrates a decade in November. Realism and timing are powerful tools in tabloid marketing. The strategy of a tabloid is to monetize the ignorance of their audience by spiking your curiosity and need to stay updated. They keep up with popular celebrities and latest trending situations in order to bring gossip and rumors to life. 

Usually you can find several tabloids posted in the front of the store commonly around the cash register where almost every consumer in the building is held dormant before their final purchase. This increases the chances of impulse buying by appealing to the senses (hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell). This marketing strategy works in several departments that would normally be irrelevant to grocery shopping. This is why tabloid newspapers would mimic the formula of candy, chips, drinks, and other easy to pick-up items with bold letters, bright colors, and familiar symbols to draw you in.

It could be surprising to one who has never bought a tabloid magazine that they are still a grocery store staple, but according to an article from The Sun, "tabloid journalism [is] a [documentation] of human voices, capturing the unpredictable and unexpected rhythms of life and existence in lucid and crisp prose." News in itself was created from a wanting that needed to be filled. In current society, the urge for detailed entertainment is present on an extremely personal level. People love the optimism behind the life of fame, and often use it as inspiration for their own lives or at least how they wish they could be. Actually the power an audience can feel behind knowing a celebrity's every move goes as deep as why they should provide this person a fanbase and making or breaking their career. The internet, of course, is a huge competitor to the supermarket tabloid base just as it is for most paper/offline products. A recent update from The Guardian states that "increases in online readership have offset the loss of print readers. According to a Newsworks press release, national newspapers jointly enjoyed a 16% year-on-year uplift across digital platforms, giving them a total of 31.5m unique browsers daily across the month of December 2016." Although there is still a print fanbase, it is very likely that print publication could fold altogether under the digital presence of news.