Don’t be fooled by Taste of Home’s Midwestern charm and focus on family-favorite recipes; the magazine, which has a print circulation of more than 3.2 million, is a powerhouse brand with a wide footprint.
It is led by Catherine Cassidy, who joined the publication as Editor in Chief in 2004, two years after it was acquired by The Reader’s Digest Association. Under her leadership, the brand has grown and continues to evolve along with its audience.
- Cassidy recently spoke with TFP and explained how the magazine has leveraged digital and social media to strengthen what has always been one of its best assets: a sense of community among Taste of Home‘s readers.
What is your current role?
I am the Editor in Chief of Taste of Home. It’s the largest food media brand in the world. We touch about 50 million customers a month, and we are in every platform—magazines, cookbooks, a beautiful website, a mobile app, a digital edition. We also have a live cooking school experience in 300 locations around the country.
What’s so unique about Taste of Home is that our content comes from our readers and our customers. They submit all of the recipes and all of the stories. We have a test kitchen here, and we test all of the recipes, but there’s a genuineness, an authenticity to our content that you just can’t find in other food magazines. So I’m very proud to be here.
I feel like I’m kind of in a stewardship role. I’m not the director; we’re curators. We were curators before that word became really cool. We are looking at all this wonderful stuff that our customers are submitting to us, and we’re choosing what makes sense for the season, and what our readers and our customers tell us that they want. So it’s really been a lot of fun, and it continues to be fun because I feel like there’s still a huge growth opportunity in this area.
How would you describe your audience?
Taste of Home is not a demographic; it’s a sensibility. My belief is that there’s a certain customer who knows us and loves us, but when we get the brand in front of a person with that sensibility, whether they’re 18 or they’re 80, they’re going to love it too. So our challenge and our opportunity is audience development. It’s about making sure our uniqueness is evident everywhere—on every page of our site, on every page of our magazines and our books—and making sure that our current customers know how many different solutions on different platforms that we offer them.
You can see this so clearly on Facebook, where we have over 500,000 fans. Facebook is a medium that makes so much sense for our brand, because our customers were sharing in print before there was any such thing as social media. We used to have a column called “Does Anyone Have…?” People would say, “I’m looking for this recipe,” and they would put their address and their name in the magazine, and they would get hundreds of letters. So as these new, cool sharing platforms have come along, they’ve just been a perfect extension of our brand. We don’t have to invent the conversation; it was already happening. It just gives our customers a new way to do it.
How are you finding that Pinterest weaves into what you do?
Beautifully! In fact, there are some months when Taste of Home’s Pinterest page has been the top referring site to our website. It goes back to our readers’ incredible desire to share with one another. It’s been remarkable. Our opportunity is how we take that and create an e-commerce opportunity from it. We’re going down that road now.
How did you get started in the industry?
I went to San Jose State University in California and majored in journalism. I knew immediately that I was not going to be a newspaper reporter. I hated chasing down stories and making people say things they didn’t want to say. So when I took a magazine writing class, I thought, “That’s exactly where I want to go.” My first job was at Runner’s World magazine.
Do you have any advice for people who are just starting out in the industry?
One of the things that I say to interns or when I speak to groups of people about how I got where I did is to do the things that scare you. Really challenge yourself to be outside your comfort zone. Every time I took a different job, that’s what I was doing.
Also, very early on in my career, I had a woman tell me that I was too nice. Basically, she said, “You need to be more of a bitch.” I disagree with that. There’s a middle ground. There is such a thing as being too nice and not being candid enough, but I find that collaboration and having a positive environment, where people feel like they’re working very hard but they’re valued and there’s fun, is where you really get people at their creative best and where they’re putting the most into it.
What’s your perspective on the industry?
I’ll give you an example. One of my daughters is 22. She does not read a newspaper. She has three devices going at any given time. Facebook is passé for her. She streams the shows that she wants to watch on her computer. She uses her tablet to read books. A lot of her textbooks or assignments in college are online. So this is the next generation of my customer. In an age where my 80-year-old father has a tablet, I think what we have to do is understand who our customer is, how they’re consuming, and then what the need is and how we should serve it.
The best thing we can do in the media is be consumers of this new technology. I talk to people who don’t have a tablet and don’t know what Pinterest is. I think, “Dude, if you are going to serve a customer who’s in this space, how are you gong to do it?” I think our business has been late to take it really seriously. Some of it is you’re waiting for the next big thing, but there isn’t the time to do that. You have to move very fast and be very nimble.
It’s interesting times, and you just have to be ready to stop what you’re doing and do something different in order to be successful. We have a number of programs here where we’re really having to rethink our approach. The traditional approach to audience development was direct mail in our organization; well, it ain’t what it used to be! We have to challenge every assumption, look at where we’re going and how can we do things differently, and watch our competition—the same things we’ve always done, but faster and better.
Given that things are moving so quickly, do you think it’s about taking more, smaller risks to sort of explore and see what works and what doesn’t?
I do, absolutely. Is there low-hanging fruit that we can get to the market quickly? What’s the next adjacent possibility? We don’t necessarily have to come up with the most successful thing ever; we just need to find new ways to grow. And I do think that taking risks and taking them quickly is the way to go.
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Posted by: Margot Knorr Mancini
