The magazine industry is experiencing rapid proliferation of titles. This creates a challenge for magazine managers who must identify their competition and media planners and advertisers who must identify the appropriate magazines in which to place advertisements. This study introduces a metric based on core customer characteristics that serves as a similarity measure for deriving market structure. The metric has the practical advantage of being formed from syndicated readership data. A taxonomy of 81 magazines is developed that shows patterns of competition within as well as between submarkets. The strengths and weaknesses of this metric and the validity of the taxonomy are discussed.
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