A subscription bundling strategy starts with the reader.

Taking a lesson from Disney, an old school company that responded to a changing market with Disney+, Roularta Media Group wanted to bundle its offerings across its 60 brands, Marc Bongers, the media company’s group transformation officer, shared with attendees at the recent INMA Media Innovation Week in Antwerp, Belgium.

A survey of its readers found 62.7% of those who read their weekly news magazine, Knack, wanted to expand their subscription and that 82.2% were willing to share their digital access. More research showed 23% of digital readers wanted to expand contented targeting women and 5% of digital readers wanted to expand their news and business content.

“That suits our company philosophy very well,” Bongers said. “A large percent of our stock is still owned by the family that started Roularta. We have family brands that are unique but interconnected. And the need of our customers to share with their family made sense to us.”

The team found many parents were already sharing their subscriptions with their kids: “There is a willingness to share,” he said. “They are already sharing their subscriptions, and we could see an opportunity.”

The company launched a subscription bundling of its MijnMagazines brand, offering three readers on one subscription — across platform, newsletters, etc. All of the company’s individual brand apps are moving into one multi-user app.

A few things the team tackled in this process:

• How to collect first-party data: To personalise content, the company needed to collect first-party data. They started by introducing a cross-brand login and cross-brand navigation tool. 
• Content check: The easiest way to add value for readers was a uniform system to tag content so editors could see which content was working.
• A company-wide data plan: The team captured data from consumers across the content brands.
• A North Star: Roularta’s North Star goal is 125,000 new digital subscribers across Belgium and The Netherlands by 2025.

A culture change was needed to bring together all of the company’s 60 brands: “Although it started with strong brands to funnel into that platform, within the platform we needed to let go of that brand just a little big (the company’s big brand),” Bongers said. 

Research backs up that thought. A Reuters study shows young readers don’t value a brand as much as older age groups do. They are more focused on content than the brand. With the changes its made, Roularta brands are now reaching a younger generation. 

“We also had to change the organisation, set up new group teams, new marketing teams overarching the brands instead of focusing on single brands,” Bongers said. “We tried to implement the internal structure to match what we brought to the outside structure.”

Engagement became the company’s primary KPI. When Roularta implemented a paywall, it was a 54% surge in logged-in user data.

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