Women’s magazines go global
By Amy Aronson Posted Sun, Apr 1 2001
Josefin Jalmert is flipping through this month’s Cosmopolitan. The cover model is wearing a floral corset-like top and glittery skirt.
Articles discuss bikinis, relationship dilemmas, summer hairdos; advertisers include Maybelline, Max Factor, Nivea, Palmolive and DKNY. The hot pink cover lines blare, “Where’s your limit for infidelity?” “I am a sex-a-holic” and “How to combine partying with a career.” The magazine looks and sounds much the same as it has since 1965, when Helen Gurley Brown turned a 70-year-old society-set monthly into a trend-setting, conversation-starting women’s service blockbuster. Except this time, the buzz will begin in Stockholm. This Cosmo, just launched in Sweden, is the 43rd international edition of the magazine to be published since 1972.
American women’s magazines have been publishing foreign editions for nearly a century, beginning with Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1910s. But only more recently have so many titles gone global. According to George Green, president of Hearst International, fewer than 10 U.S. publishers today are doing business internationally, but that handful of corporate giants are responsible for thousands of satellite editions worldwide. Fashion magazines such as Condé Nast’s Vogue, for instance, can be found throughout Europe, Russia, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Brazil. Its arch rival, Harper’s Bazaar, is in 17 countries from Chile to the Czech Republic. Although Ladies’ Home Journal now publishes only the flagship domestic edition, its long-time challenger, Good Housekeeping, appears in 12 countries to date.
The queen of the crop is Hearst’s Cosmopolitan. The top-selling women’s magazine on the planet, it reaches more than 34 million every single month. During the 1970s and ’80s, Cosmo spread mainly to first-world markets like the UK, Australia, France, Germany and Japan. But in the past decade, it has surged into emerging markets, including Turkey (1992), Russia and the Czech Republic (1994), Argentina and India (1996), Indonesia (1997), China (1998), Ukraine (1999) and Korea (2000). Despite economic and political instabilities around the world, every one of Cosmo’s international editions is running in the black.
What on earth is the secret of their success? Helen Gurley Brown, who heads all international editions of Cosmo, says it’s a vision thing. “We have a format, and an image of women, that works,” she states. The “Cosmo girl” is a familiar figure in mainstream (read: white, middle-class) American culture. She is a smart, careerist, consumerist go-getter, who wants it all and accepts the value of sex appeal in getting it — both at home and in the office. She is the figurehead of the feminism that has best prevailed here: whether CEO or secretary, her womanly virtues are anything but a disadvantage in her individual pursuit of happiness.
Brown says this idea — or really the aspirations embedded in it — has appeal around the world. “There isn’t much question that women are all alike on the inside — regardless of the veil or the schmata,” she explains. “Women want to be loved and cherished, and they want to be independent creatures and don’t want to always get their identity as someone’s mother or wife. They want to do something on their own.” Green states simply that the magazine is number one globally because “it’s about
empowerment.”
That message is the essence of Cosmopolitan as a brand, which Hearst polices mightily to ensure allegiance to the American model. The publishers of satellite editions may be wholly owned subsidiaries, joint venture partners or licensors of the brand, are always closely supervised by the mother ship. Brown looks through every issue from every country to see if they’ve got the right stuff. “I can’t read Japanese,” she admits, “but I can tell if they’re doing the basic Cosmopolitan. I use yellow stickies to mark any problems.” And Hearst follows-up. “We have the right to see everything from every foreign edition in advance,” notes Green, “and if we don’t, or if it’s not acceptable, we get on a plane.”
While not all foreign editions are as closely controlled, most wind up near-copies of the U.S. version anyway. Madelin Boskowich, ad sales manager at Ideas Publishing Group (IPG), through which Condé Nast publishes Vogue and Glamour in Latin America, says, “We are under no obligation, but we take 80 to 90 percent of our editorial content from the American Glamour.” From where they sit, the original already has it all. “Our readers want the best of the best. They want to know what’s going to be the biggest thing in fitness, healthcare, beauty, skin care,” Boskowich explains. “We make adjustments for expressions and usage in translating, but in essence you have a very complete book as it is.”
Like many U.S. global corporations, American women’s magazine publishers proclaim that their products make money because they’re worth it, but they also admit they benefit from a certain cache. All international brands carry additional prestige, notes Green, simply because they are imported.
Plus, many American products carry a special luster, and cultural materials lead that list. In 1998, U.S. cultural exports surpassed aerospace as the nation’s top foreign moneymaker. American cultural predominance results from a host of managerial, marketing and other business advantages — many of them quietly backed by Washington since the 1920s. But they also have the world in their pocket in more subtle, representational ways. For one thing, images of American can-do-ism and comfort already come with at least an occasional multicultural face.
Some are also packaged in a woman’s body. The best-selling U.S. women’s magazines take a kind of feminist — and certainly very American — brand of what women want (independence, sexual freedom, individual success) and globalize it. That’s what worries some people. Since Cosmo’s launch in Beijing, for instance, Brown says, “The Chinese government has been looking at us at all times.” In Singapore and elsewhere, they have had difficulty “finding a publisher who isn’t afraid of spreading the Cosmo message.”
More broadly, many governments fear cultural homogenization, by which they really mean American domination. Green relays that “any number of countries are concerned because American things — food, music, fashion, movies, models, personalities—have become part of local cultures.” Indeed, many abroad complain that American cultural products are effectively stifling and supplanting local expressions, superimposing American mythologies, mores and marketplace mentality on the world’s memory, imagination and values. Yet Green asserts that only governments are upset, “the people are not.” He explains, “They are living those lives and accepting that direction.”
Women like Boskowich and Brown say it stronger, suggesting the American direction is the way to go. “You see it in women candidates in Latin America,” Boskowich argues. “These things stem from the American example of women going for it, from the idea of empowerment, of getting a sense of fulfillment besides being a caretaker, lover, friend.” The magazines show women, she says, “that we may not have everything, but we can have anything.”
This thinking is terrific for profitability, especially since “having anything” often entails buying the advertised material goods. But Brown, whose own ascent argues that the American myth can work for women, sees bigger benefits, as well. She believes extending the Cosmo brand is extending a helping hand to women everywhere. “We are helping readers seek a better life. Careers are not as promising in Croatia or Lithuania as they are in New York,” she says, “yet still there is a career to be had.” Cosmo is very successful in India and has done exceptionally well in Russia, she notes, “where they don’t have anything like us.”
“I know the world is getting smaller and smaller,” Brown says. “I like to think we help in making it one world.” Even if we share but a Coke and smile, that’s powerful.