Magazine Uses Research to Help Beat Competition

Good Housekeeping magazine plans to get more mileage out of the work of researchers who have helped make its seal a symbol of reliability.

The venerable Hearst Corp. magazine, which turns 110 years old on Tuesday, created the Good Housekeeping Institute at the turn of the century to make sure that products advertised in the magazine lived up to their ad claims.

Manufacturers whose products met the standards and bought the requisite amount of ad space got the right to the Good Housekeeping Seal.

The institute, with a staff of about 60 chemists, engineers, nutritionists and other researchers, still does that work.

Publisher Alan M. Waxenberg said 50 to 60 pages of advertising are rejected as a result of the reviews each year. That is about 3% of the 1,560 pages of ads carried in the magazine last year.

Editor in Chief Ellen Levine, who took over at Good Housekeeping last October, said the magazine has drawn on the research for stories but never highlighted it. She decided to make even greater use of the research and unveiled a new symbol in the May issue to call attention to it.

The red-and-white oval emblem with the words GH Institute Report will mark reports based on institute research. In the May issue, the emblem marked reports on vacuum cleaners (“Here are our 7 favorites”), long-lasting lipsticks (“How long is long”) and fast-food (“The fast-food survival guide”).

The emblems also marked reports on how metal cookware may affect health. Levine said it would mark stories in which the institute researchers make sense of conflicting scientific studies--does fish oil prevent cancer, for example.

“It offers the perfect competitive advantage,” Levine said in a recent interview. “Not only is it good for the reader, but it gives the reader a vision of this magazine that is uniquely different and a reason to buy it.”

Good Housekeeping ranked second last year in circulation and third in advertising pages among the seven best-selling women’s magazines.

Its circulation for the six months ended Dec. 31 was 5.2 million a month, trailing only Better Homes and Gardens at 7.6 million, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Good Housekeeping’s 1,559 ad page total was down 1.9% from 1993 but trailed only Woman’s Day at 1,694 pages and Family Circle at 1,602, according to Publishers’ Information Bureau.

Some readers may fault the magazine for featuring the best without warning consumers away from the worst in the product comparison reports.

Levine makes no apology. “We are not Consumer Reports. First of all, we don’t have the space for it. And second, I don’t think it is what a reader really wants to know. She wants to know what to buy,” she said.

She said most women are already “on information overload” and look to Good Housekeeping for sound advice on how to make life easier.

“The day I tell them something is good and it turns out to be bad, then I have a problem. I hope we’ll never get into that situation,” Levine said.

The new GH Institute Report emblem doesn’t carry the same clout as the Good Housekeeping Seal, however.

Good Housekeeping pledges to replace or refund the price for any product that bears its seal and proves to be defective within a year after the sale.

Waxenberg declined to say how many claims are filed or payouts made due to the seal but said the complaints received number in the hundreds.

The GH Institute Report emblem carries no warranty. Waxenberg anticipates no reader confusion about that difference.

Roberta Garfinkle, who buys magazine ad space for the agency McCann-Erickson-New York, said Good Housekeeping “has never really used the institute to its full potential. . . . It may generate renewed confidence in the book.”

Magazine consultant Martin Walker counts the new program as a plus. “Readers will get some more value out of it,” he said.