The future of magazine distribution

The future of magazine distribution

How can the distribution of magazines at train stations and airports be revolutionized in the future in order to account for the customers’ preferences within these settings?

Our vision is based on three main consumer behaviours having been observed in context. First, consumers tend to enjoy taking their time, reading magazines as a means of time consumption while waiting for the train/plane. Second, many consumers enjoy the element of surprise in magazines. Finally, about half of the consumers would like to be able to customize their own magazine.

We believe that the best solution is to remove many of the physical magazines and create space for a small digital library. The library contains furnishing aimed for relaxation, and digital tablets through which the customer not only reads the available magazines, but also has the possibility to customize their own magazine by combining parts of different issues of the same magazine. The consumer can also choose to add “surprise content” where the amount of surprise content being displayed in the magazine is completely up to the consumer to decide. Once a magazine is chosen/customized/complete, it can either be loaded to a personal tablet reader, or be printed on demand in the store using technologies for nano-printing. Finally, consumers in a hurry also have the possibility of logging on to the their profiles on the magazine network, choose or customize the magazines as they wish, and then buy the physical version of them in the store, or download them to their tablets.