Brand audit assignment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4750 words

Brand audit assignment - Essay Example During this time, Cosmopolitan started to become more of a literary magazine, with the introduction of serial fiction and book reviews being published in the magazine for the first time. During this time, Walker not only managed to triple the magazines subscriptions, he also provided the magazine with a general direction that was continued when in 1889 John Brisben Walker purchased the magazine. During this time, top writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser began writing for the Cosmopolitan regularly and it became one of America’s leading literary magazines. From the early 20th century to the 1940’s, the magazine continued to grow in nationwide circulations and became a full-fledged self proclaimed â€Å"Four book magazine†, publishing a combination of a novella, six to eight short stories, serials, six to eight articles and assorted features. However, during the late 1950’s the magazine began to lose some of its l oyal readership when the paperback and television started to become household commodities and took the focus off magazines. The Birth of the â€Å"Cosmo Girl† It was only in the 60’s that drastic change ensued and the magazine started out on its journey to become what it is today: a leading magazine catering to the â€Å"fun, fearless woman† of today who seeks information and advice about sex, relationships, fashion and their well-being. The magazine as it is today was reshaped at a point when it had become a general interest magazine, with rapidly declining profits and mass market appeal. At the time this change happened, American society on the whole was going through a phase of tentative change, women all over the country were beginning to realize the power of their own femininity and were beginning to explore the limits of their own sexuality. The predominantly male oriented society was becoming more open to freedom of thought and speech and women were start ing to look at avenues of work that were previously dominated by males. During that time, Helen Gurley Brown, a newly married copywriter, wrote a fictional account of a single girl who was living the kind of new and exciting life that women of that age wanted to live, a life where they had the freedom to do whatever they pleased and be happy without a stable man or relationship in their life. This new book, â€Å"Sex and the Single Girl† encouraged women to enjoy their sexuality without guilt, a topic which interested the woman of the 60’s so much that the book became an instant best-seller (Benjamin, J., 2009). The success of the book, and the frenzy of thank you notes from women who wanted further advice on their personal issues gave Helen Gurley Brown the idea of creating her own magazine which would allow her to address these women directly and give them advice about their personal issues regarding sex, relationships and health. This idea lead her to the Hearst Cor poration’s aging â€Å"general interest† magazine for Men and Women, The Cosmopolitan. The owners of the magazine were already planning to close it down and gave her the reigns to try out her new format in the hopes that she could breathe new life into the magazines declining circulation. This decision proved to be a remarkably apt one as the magazine’