Women love handbag format

Mach Basic 2006-2 Jürg Marquard's Joy is finding more and more friends among Swiss women. In 2002, the German women's magazine Joy switched to pocket format (168 x 223 millimetres) and realigned its content. Since then, its paid circulation has skyrocketed from 200,000 to half a million copies per month. The mix of topics from fashion, beauty, people, men, sex and love, coupled with the practical format for every handbag, was so well received that publisher Jürg Marquard soon pushed ahead with expansion into other countries - including Switzerland. In 2003, Joy was given a Swiss split with its own editorial team, and two years later the magazine was listed in Mach Basic for the first time: With 133,000 readers, it was immediately able to place itself ahead of Ringier's Bolero (117,000 readers at the time). But now Joy has made further gains: Within a year, the readership of the monthly magazine increased significantly by 22.6 percent to 163,000 women, meaning that the small magazine was also able to overtake the larger-format Freundin from the Burda publishing house in terms of reach. The latter lost significant reach in the same period.
At the Freundin publishing house on Arabellastrasse in Munich, people are puzzled by the loss. Advertising manager Anett Hanck finds the result "strange", as nothing has changed in terms of distribution or the fortnightly Swiss split, and circulation is just as high as before. Hanck does not believe that the erosion at Freundin could have anything to do with the rise of Joy.
Albrecht Hengstenberg, Managing Director of Media Verlags Gesellschaft, a subsidiary of Marquard Media, works a few doors down. He also shies away from making a comparison between Joy and Freundin. However, the success in Switzerland shows what is already clear in Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and elsewhere: "The editorial concept, tone and format of Joy hits the nerve of young, mobile women particularly well," says Hengstenberg.   
Markus Knöpfli