Judging A Magazine by Its Cover – A Conceptual Framework to Understand Sales Through Content and Design Interaction

ABSTRACT Content Design is advocated as one of the key factors influencing consumers’ attitude and buying behavior. However, its real effects on sales performance remain largely unknown. We propose a research framework to evaluate the effect of content design on sales and empirically test its employability within the German magazine retail sector. To develop the research framework, we first derive a set of related success factors from several literature streams. We then conduct a content analysis of over 500 magazine covers and relate this data to real-life retail sales figures via linear mixed model analysis to investigate which aspects of content design affect sales. The findings point toward the usefulness of our proposed framework. They further indicate that in hedonic media consumption, the colors purple and blue, text-image congruence, wording that leads to ease of cognitive processing and promotional activities are pivotal in sales.