The futures of magazine publishing: Servitization and co-creation of customer value

This study incorporates the futures studies and foresight perspectives in analysing an industrial change towards service business, with the magazine markets as the case context. It illustrates how the industry is adopting a new competitive strategy via services that are added to the total offering, and how it is simultaneously developing a deeper understanding of the service relationship as value co-creation. The work identifies seven trends in this context and analyses their impacts and discontinuities. Three trends are linked primarily to the business environment: a dispersing customer base, changes in media use habits, and erosion of product business. Four trends describe the behaviour of companies: the shifts from products to value-adding brands, from R&D to innovation, from autonomy to partnering and sharing in an ecosystem, and the changing resource and capability needs. The contributions of this work are twofold. First, studying media as service has been rare in scholarly literature. Second, applying the service perspective to the trend analysis in the media sector is topical due to the increasing competition and unpredictability of the business environment.