Book of the Month: Avid Readers Apply!

Book of the Month has such a personally enticing structure that I wanted to cover it in this week’s thought paper! The concept is simple: each month, Book of the Month chooses five great books for subscribers to choose from, and you get to pick which one you get for the month! Best of all, they include a lovely description for each book to help you pick which book you’d like to have for the month. These descriptions do not give away the book’s plot, but rather convey to you a sense of the book’s difficulty, timeline details, and important topics covered. The description section even gives you reviews from other authors who liked the book, to give you an idea about how much you would like the book in question.

So who comprises the target market for Book of the Month? On the surface it seems pretty simple: people who like to read! But their target market is actually a little more specific than just readers. First and foremost, the target market isn’t just readers, it is AVID readers. The target market for a company that gives you a book every month must be made up of people who are interested in reading at least a book per month! In addition, the target market for Book of the Month is made up of readers who like newer books as opposed to older ones, readers who want to tap into a reading community rather than just reading on their own, and readers who want an extra incentive to keep up with their reading. The demographic makeup of Book of the Month’s target market is most likely female-leaning, younger-leaning, and of a lower financial class. This can be inferred from Book of the Month’s website and advertising makeup, which focuses clearly on younger, female reading models, and promotes itself as financially prudent. In addition, the target market could be described as one that is passionate about social issues, since the book descriptions tend to highlight whether a book has good representation in terms of LGBTQ+ , racial diversity, and feminist ideology.

I would market to Book of the Month’s target audience primarily on Instagram and Pinterest given the younger age range of the audience and the wonderful visual content opportunities presented by book covers and imagery. I would do some research to make sure I was marketing to people who tended to sign up for subscription services in general, as customers who sign up for one of these services are very susceptible for signing up for another, similar service. My main strategy would be marketing Book of the Month as a trendy, socially conscious book subscription service that introduces you to a engaged, supportive reading community and allows you to personalize your monthly reading experience. I would do this marketing through visual content and culturally conscious posting on the aforementioned social media sites to position Book of the Month as a group of friends similar to your own.

While Book of the Month has a lot of great aspects about it — and while I believe the community aspect of the service could be enhanced and promoted much more than it currently is — I believe the unique selling point of this company is the ability to personalize your reading experience without doing too much work yourself. Like any good subscription service, what ultimately drives customers to Book of the Month is the exciting ability to get a new product every month that seems personally tailored to you and your interests. Twelve times a year, Book of the Month gives you a book that you’ll love, and you won’t be disappointed because you know what’s in store and that you’ll like what the book has to offer already! Book of the Month doesn’t just tailor the experience to your interests though, it also picks books for you to choose from so that you don’t have to do too much searching on your own. What kind of subscription service would be fun if you had to do a bunch of work to find just the right book for you every month? No, Book of the Month picks 5 books that have a great range of topics and styles so that you’re assured at least one that’ll be good for your reading personality.

It’s very important for a company to have a unique selling point like the aforementioned selling point for Book of the Month, because otherwise it becomes very hard to find your target audience and to market to them effectively. If you cannot differentiate your company from other companies in the same market sphere, then how will you stand out? How can you push yourselves ahead of your competitors? More to the point, you don’t really know who your target market is because you don’t know what makes your company special and who might be attracted to that special quality. Even if you have an idea of who makes up your target market, you won’t be able to market as effectively as possible. You’ll just be sending them product content that is similar to other services in the same arena, and customers will scroll right by you even if they would be the perfect consumers for your product.