Department Branding

Good departments invite your readers to return.

Departments form the backbone of any strong magazine. These are the signposts that readers will return to, issue after issue. The feature well is a gamble. Your audience might engage with some of your stories; they might not. But the departments need to offer value with every engagement. They’re the truest expression of your magazine’s identity.

As such, they should be named accordingly. Brand your departments with the same care with which you brand your magazine. Under the best circumstances, those department brands should be extensions of the top-level magazine brand.

And provide your readers with a tagline. This communicates the department’s brand promise to your readers. Without this guidance, they won’t know what to expect from a given department and may not fully understand why you’ve organized your content as you have.

Here’s a case study:

Let’s suppose your magazine is branded Dialogue, stressing your organization’s commitment to its readership through the encouragement of a 2-way conversation between audience and publication.

Now, let’s suppose that Dialogue has a front-of-book news section. What should it be called? Here are a few ideas:

1. Talking Points: The news & information our readers are discussing. This introduces two synonyms to the established Dialogue concept: talking and discussion. It also helpfully establishes this department as a source of “news & information.” But a talking point is, typically, an instruction on specific speech to use — not exactly the warmest phrase to describe the intended give-and-take with the readers.

2. Chatter: What we’re hearing about this month. This is much more informal, introducing both a clipped, fun-sounding term to replace “talking” as well as the pronoun “we,” which draws the reader in as a member of an exclusive group. It also stresses that the magazine is listening for important information rather than defining it independently. But “chatter” has a negative connotation; it’s often used to refer to meaningless or even annoying chitchat, if not outright gossip.

3. The Breeze: Airing the latest news, discourse & intelligence. Here, we strike a healthy balance between authority and informality. “The Breeze” is instantly light and refreshing (unlike, say, another metaphor: “windy”) and provokes the reader to fill in the missing word to make sense of the title. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it actually promotes a sense of engagement and belonging. Meanwhile, the introduction of the word “intelligence” serves a double meaning: it connotes both privileged information as well as the academic improvement that the reader can be expected to experience as a result of consuming this content.

Apply this same sort of exercise to every department in your magazine. You’ll strengthen your overall brand expression while entertaining readers with what would otherwise be a perfunctory, functional page element. That’s one more building block of audience loyalty.