SALT LAKE CITY, Oct. 29, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- While newspapers around the country are announcing layoffs and cutbacks, The Dallas Morning News recently published that it has added pages back, announced a search for five accomplished journalists, and increased subscriber-based revenue substantially.
How is The Dallas Morning News able to beat the odds and grow in a downwardly spiraling market? By finding the unique-to-them formula for optimizing consumer preferences and correcting the gap between current subscription rate vs. value perceived by the subscribers.
Leading predictive modeling firm The Modellers LLC is helping newspapers, including The Dallas Morning News, not only recover from market forces, but thrive despite them. The Modellers successfully conducts difficult, complex and sophisticated market research that allows newspaper executives to confidently make bold business decisions.
"In reaction to declining advertising revenue and lower subscriber bases, newspaper firms have made deep cuts in their products in order to reduce costs and save money," explains Randy Hill, Vice President of The Modellers LLC. "By doing so, many of them, unwittingly of course, devalued their brand by cutting back on the product that readers want and are willing to pay for."
Hill continued, "Our sophisticated analytics and modeling provides our valued newspaper clients with the foundation needed to make bold decisions regarding subscription pricing, while placing renewed focus on continued improvements in various drivers of content quantity and quality."
The Modellers' advanced research techniques have helped newspapers across the country optimize their content and subscription pricing to their individual markets. The firm has had tremendous success helping newspapers identify their tipping point for subscriber retention. For example, by employing a research-based strategy completely different from The Dallas Morning News, The Deseret News has increased subscribership 14% over the past nine months.
"Robust and powerful readership research has been a key success factor in informing our decisions regarding reformatting our paper," says Salt Lake City, Utah's Deseret News publisher Jim Wall. "You can't make those critical life-and-death decisions in a data vacuum or with the old "golden gut" touch. You have to have all the decision-making intelligence you can lay your hands on to inform your decisions."
"Different markets, different strategies, great research. There's no single strategy or set of tactics that work for everyone; it depends on the market, the target, and what the paper is delivering now, and what they plan to deliver - and how they plan to deliver it -- in the future," concludes Hill.
Notes to Editors
A nationwide full-service market research firm, The Modellers is the premier supplier of decision-making intelligence in the nation. The firm specializes in advanced analytics, optimization, and predictive modeling research studies, providing clients with deep and accurate insights that help them make better decisions.