| Product: |
Marie Claire |
| Date: |
14/08/07 (409 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Glamour And Sophistication In A Saturated Market, Grown Up Attitude
Disadvantages: Price, Lack Of Up-To-Date Fashion, Overtaken By Adverts.
It was with an almighty thud that the copy of Marie-Claire hit our hall floor. I won’t pretend it was long awaited, in fact I’d forgotten about it. One of those Greasy Palm offers recently was tied into a magazine subscription, faced with a stark choice of Home and Garden etc, I’d plumped for the good old Marie-Claire. At least there might be some righteous feminist article in there, a few glimpses of cutting edge fashion, a voucher or a free front cover lipstick. Anyway, something I could relate to as a 20-something woman, without a hayfever inducing cover shot or boring mail order elastic man-corsets.
I am a magazine lover. There, I’ve admitted my vice out loud without regard for the mounting stacks of evidence that topple from The Boyfriend’s coffee table or stuff the dusty void beneath my bed. I read them all, doing the puzzles in Take a Break and Bella, laughing at the celebrity gossip in Heat and poring over cleansing techniques to be ignored in You. I’ve never really bought a Marie Claire though, even in the limited motorway service stations on a journey home from Edinburgh I chose to pick up Glamour (and that had rehab stalwart Li-Lo plastered across the cover).
The first time I read a Marie-Claire was at the age of 13, while waiting for Best Friend to get ready for a night out. It was on her bed, unopened and likely to stay that way. She’s a girl who hated reading with a passion when we were growing up, bizarre that she now frequents Bookhopper – somehow I don’t think we can thank Marie Claire for that. I remember that there was a sole article on Chinese foot binding or something with the rest of the magazine given over to adverts and articles which were just Clearasil-type promotions in disguise.
What would have changed I wondered? The answer is * nothing *. At first glance, Marie-Claire is subtle. It lacks the neon shout of the trashy gossip magazines or the eye-catching SEX headlines of rival Cosmo. Even the price of £2.90 is middle of the road for this kind of publication. Perhaps the saving grace is that it looks like a nice magazine for nice girls. Even the cover girl is demure on an inoffensive background with little or no teeth or cleavage on display. You wouldn’t be ashamed to be caught reading it on the morning train or have to fish about on the top shelf for it. I’ll use the September issue as a case in point, one of the headlines is ‘It’s cool to care, your shopping choices can change the world’. Deep in a shallow kind of way.
There’s usually a free gift encased in the plastic cover. This month it was a make up bag. Last month a couple of crappy wooden bracelets that wouldn’t have fitted a three year old and the month before, yeah, another make up bag. I do like a free gift (who wouldn’t) but there’s nothing too imaginative about these. I once, aged 11, begged my mum for a copy of Mizz to get my hands on the tiny pot of must have limited edition lip balm. It turned out to be rock hard, stung like hell and went missing in a week, but I had to have it. Later on (at 24) The Boyfriend and I spent a sunny afternoon tearing apart the racks in Tesco to get the ‘right’ Cosmo – i.e. the one with the very wearable string bikini. Sounds sad, but this is what a good free gift can drive a girl to and it makes my point that the Marie Claire ones went straight onto the Car Boot Pile.
Having written a negative piece here so far, I flipped up the Marie Claire website to check out two things; firstly some interesting snippet to pass onto all you Dooyooers and secondly to see if I caould find out Marie Claire’s target audience and therefore cut the magazine some slack. Well, this is a amazing website. Shiny, monochrome and eyecatching with glamourous celebrity photos. Oooh, before I knew it I was chasing headlines left, right and centre at http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/.
Did Elizabeth Arden use a body double for Britney Spears in their latest perfume advert? Are women with breast implants three times more likely to commit suicide? Well, where’s this in my magazine? Why would I pay £2.90 to read about Mandy Moore (don’t know who she is) when I could be on this website enjoying hot gossip for free? Perhaps IPC media could and should switch this around., after all this is up to the minute and interesting.
As we all know though, monthly magazines have to be prepared a long way in advance. In Marie Claire’s defence this might well explain the fashion focus on the now dated smock top and a lack of September’s hot new look of waistcoats and sharp suit trousers. It could be the logic behind the interviews with now over exposed Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse. The trouble with these music interviews in any case, is that if I wanted cutting edge or next big thing I’d be trawling through the specialist NME. I might crave a little more detail on already popular singers, but not for long after I’d seen a million photos plastered across the tabloids or heard the newest album to musical death on the radio. The timing for music articles has to be impeccable and this is perhaps a lot to ask of a monthly magazine.
Is there anything I like about Marie Claire? Yes. I love the fact that it doesn’t rehash the same hackneyed bore-gasm articles that Cosmopolitan shamelessly devotes itself to. It’s a little more upmarket and worldly wise than other magazines without following the current trend of baby bashing. By this I mean the hideous tendency of magazines to either try to ‘age with their readership’ or appeal to an older audience by running back to back articles on how to regain your pre-pregnancy figure or dress as a yummy mummy. Nothing makes a young woman with plans more likely to sling the magazine back to the dentist’s waiting room.
The worthy articles I mentioned earlier are generally the main feature. The focus isn’t always on the points I’d like to hear most about and case studies are skimmed at best, leaving an irritation when you want to feel compassion. However, there’s a certain interest in reading about life in a women’s prison or a new fashion label by Brazilian sex workers. The coverage of a Courtney Cox interview in a recent issue was surprisingly sharp (albeit shamelessly agenda pushing in terms of her new TV series) and didn’t attempt to knock off her edges. Not only that, but they published the interview long before the spate of similar articles in rival magazines. The Life and Style section with its fixtures and furnishings adds a touch of grown up glamour and the beauty investigation into Laser Facials is the kind of thing that appeals to a broad range of women.
Best of all, this chunky A4 magazine smells good with old fashioned perfume samples and sachets of one cream or another between the pages. It exudes a old world of magazine splendour which seems to have become long-lost among the current breed of trashy bi-weeklies. There’s something about the Marie Claire image that says charm and elegance in comparison to other publications.
I did eventually dig out the information on Marie Claire’s target audience on another site. “Intelligent women interested in everything from fashion to world politics” and according to pacificmagazines.com “Marie Claire delivers the highest reach of any fashion or women’s lifestyle magazine into the highly coveted target audience of women 25-39”. The target audience is after all me, so how well do I think it fits the bill? Overall it’s not that bad. It fills a niche for women who want neither pie recipes nor knitting patterns and who really couldn’t care less if Jordan is one inch taller than Peter Andre. I didn’t notice anything beyond Daily Mail style superficial ‘outrage’ though, when it comes to world politics.
It hasn’t in its fifteen year history succumbed to the dumbing down which afflicted magazines like 19 and Cosmopolitan (who were desperate to play down to the school girls who in turn only read them because they looked ‘grown up’.) The impressive statistic says as much about Marie Claire’s staying power as it does about the appalling choice available for 25-39 year olds.
As I read a lot of magazines, I don’t like to spend too much on each individual one. I also try to limit my petrol station sprees to magazines with a lot of reading, fewer adverts and good swapability. For this reason I probably won’t be picking Marie Claire up off the shelf when I can get a 99p trashfest with Primark’s weekly selection. However, on a holiday sunbed with The Boyfriend splashing in the pool I could easily fish this out of my beach bag and settle in for half an hour with nothing too demanding or outrageous to grab my attention.
Summary: Inoffensive and indifferent but not a lost cause.
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