AndyB wrote:Mike Stirling cannot afford to produce a Beano that will please people in their 20s, 30s and 40s - he has to produce it for an 8-year old, the target audience, and in such a way that said 8 year old's parents will want to buy it for them.
I doubt whether anybody would argue with the points you raise, Andy, but you are evading both the issue of cost, and that of value for money. Mike Stirling is obviously quite capable of producing an issue of
The Beano for your 8-year-old target. For this he charges £1.50. My problem is that when he includes some kind of enticement or inducement to buy with an issue, he charges £2.50. Why, if
The Beano is as attractive as it seems to be, should there be any need for the extra inducement, especially given that the bundle is £1 more expensive than it was the previous week, a price that would seem to be an anti-inducement? Is it because fewer children are buying the comic? Or are they merely not buying it when the inducement is not very enticing, but the price has gone up to £2.50 anyway? Is the choice of a good item like the Lego figure an attempt to persuade huge numbers of children to buy that week's issue of
The Beano, and facilitate megasales? When I was buying comics and story papers regularly, every so often a free gift was included. Some had a limited lifespan like the
Big Crack Bang, others had greater longevity, such as a set of photographs of cricketers, or entertainers, with biographical information on the back, but crucially they could be called free gifts because the price of the comic did not increase in those weeks. The Lego figure adds two thirds of the basic price of
The Beano to the basic price of
The Beano that week. Clearly the Lego figure cannot be called a free gift. What is it then? A bribe? I doubt whether any item like the ball of slime (I think that was sellotaped to the front of an issue of
The Dandy that I bought for my grandson Jordan several years ago) would have been any sort of threat to the future of the comic, but is it not possible that this Lego figure might just be too successful and therefore detrimental to the future of
The Beano? Next week the children might just get their parents to buy them more Lego, and dispense with
The Beano altogether.
