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Feb. 10, 2006
Some advertising slogans are so good that they never die, even after a product or the company that created it disappears or stops advertising. One of my favorites, “An educated consumer is our best customer,” may only be familiar to New Yorkers who listened to the trademark ads for the Syms Clothing Store in New York City, but it came to mind when I read this recent comment by Lazy Eye in the McNamara Report forums:
As any educated consumer knows, digital resolving power is a very complex mix of pixel count and pixel quality, light levels, gain (ISO setting), lens resolving power, external physical effects, coupled with post-capture processing settings including noise reduction and compression algorithms and image processing.
The problem is that probably 99.9% of consumers are not educated. The real barrier to those who want to get educated is that they are faced with a baffling array of "educators" who either have something to sell or are just a litle more educated than those they are trying to illuminate. PP&I falls in the former category of those who want to sell something…
Lazy Eye obviously has an incredibly high opinion of the 0.1% of consumers who are educated enough to know what constitutes his definition of digital resolving power. (Hey, LE, you might want to add autofocus accuracy, shutter speed, and aperture as variables.) And he sure has all of us at PP&I pegged—we are definitely in the category of those who want to sell something. But does the fact that we are trying to sell more magazines make us a barrier to those who want to get educated? Nope! Under that definition, nearly every textbook ever sold would be a barrier to learning. Every seminar, trade show, business, or organization dedicated to helping any type of industry to grow would also be barriers to learning.
In the consumer magazine industry, selling is part of the success formula. But as every educated consumer knows, it's only part of the formula. In order to be successful, a magazine like Popular Photography& Imaging has to sell something of real value to its readers. Do we put a featured DSLR's megapixel count on the cover to try and grab more attention on the newsstands? Yep. And if that's all we did, about 50,000 copies would get sold, and no one would subscribe. But nearly half a million readers subscribe because every issue contains enough insight, honest product evaluation, and inspiration to justify the relatively low price. To paraphrase the slogan from Syms, “An educated photographer is our best customer.”
And hey! On top of that, we provide a free web site loaded with some of the same great material—and a place for our readers to voice their opinions. Do I sound like I'm selling something? You bet I am, and I'm darn proud of my product. But Lazy Eye has a right to his opinion, however puzzling it may be. After all, if I believed that a magazine I subscribed to was nothing more than a shill for the manufacturers who advertised in it, I wouldn't subscribe to it, or waste a minute of my time in its web forums.
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