I’ve worked as an editor in the business press for a while. Ok, a long while, like 25+ years, and have worked in many different markets.
One of the things all magazine publishing teams will try to do is build a community around their publication and their brand. Their core product might be a magazine, or website, but they extend their tentacles into other areas, develop connections with industry associations, and create ways that bring their readers together.
Their goal is to wrap their arms around as large a community as possible, and claim to their advertisers that they are the ones with the biggest community and they have the tightest relationship with them.
This notion of community matters quite a bit to the advertisers who are the ones paying the bills for business publications like this one with their advertising.
Advertisers and suppliers, while they have other means of trying to contact their buyers directly, have done well historically by piggybacking their marketing efforts on the backs of the publications that attract and engage with their audiences. In effect, they are being invited to a party, and the coolest people in the room are already there.
What’s rewarding about the Canadian auto dealer magazine community, is that it’s not just marketing or publisher BS. This magazine does have a community and it extends from coast to coast from the largest dealership groups to the smallest single rooftop operators.
Now the editing, sales and publishing team have worked hard for more than a dozen years to build their connection to that community, by covering events, doing the work to understand the issues, writing countless articles in print, digital and video, and meeting as many readers as possible. So kudos to us, I guess.
But the reality is that the community and fraternity of car dealers already existed and was healthy and vibrant before we arrived. Maybe it’s because they are a finite group: our core audience is the approx. 3,400 franchised new car and truck dealers in Canada. That’s it. Anyone else who reads our publications is bonus readership, but not our target.
So even if the community did exist, publisher Niel Hiscox’s vision was to create a publication to serve it better than any other media source, and he’s been steering that ship since the magazine’s first issue in 2005.
What got me thinking about this notion of community are a few recent, and random occurrences that just reminded me of how lucky we are to be part of this community.
For starters, when I need to get a comment for a story or need to talk to a dealer about something, I can pretty much think of someone in every province that I can contact — and they will get back to me.
The same is true of the people running CADA, the national dealer association, and each of the provincial dealer associations. They support the work we are trying to do on the behalf of their member dealers.
We have assembled the industry’s top roster of columnists who understand the world of Canadian dealers. They too respond to every outreach, and they unfailingly deliver new material in each issue that makes our magazine essential reading.
When we mess something up, and we do from time to time, people in the community will let us know about it. Sometimes they are pissed off, but they still take the time to let us know, because what we say matters, and they see us as an important part of their community.
In many ways, car dealers do many of the same things in their businesses as they build their own “communities” within their communities. So maybe car dealers and publishers have a lot more in common than you might imagine. We are proud to be part of the auto dealer community.
