Want to sell more products and services through your print pieces? Maybe you should stop trying so hard to simply sell.

That’s the advice of Dr. Samir Husni, one of the nation’s most highly regarded authorities on modern magazine publishing. Known widely as “Mr. Magazine,” Husni serves as director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism, where he is also professor and Hederman Lecturer. He maintains his own Web site, authors an annual guide to new magazines and conducts regular interviews around the country about contemporary publishing.

Deliver® recently talked with Mr. Magazine about the direction of custom magazines, catalogs and other printed communications vital to the marketing mix. In the first part of a two-part interview, Dr. Husni urges CMOs to view print marketing as a matchmaking function, one in which their publications focus less on the hard sell and more on fashioning a unique, relevant and seductive experience. Read the second half of the interview with Dr. Husni here.

DELIVER: What role do branded communications, especially magazines, play in helping companies meet marketing objectives?

SAMIR HUSNI: One of the latest trends today is what we refer to as the “grand experience,” that engagement process we used to have in the good old days — before we surrendered that time to the Internet and computers, when people received a magazine and immediately felt they were a part of a community. The magazine in hand is an experience that you enjoy as you flip the pages, as you engage with that magazine and as you lose yourself in reading it. If the audience is clearly identified and the relationship between the audience and the brand is the best matchmaking effort, then we have a very successful effort. Every time somebody loses themselves within that experience, you know they become addicted to it — and therefore will become users of that brand.

DELIVER: Are there companies that produce quality branded communications?

HUSNI: There are, but it depends on the magazine and whom it aims to target. A good example is Mine, the customized magazine created by Time Inc. and Lexus. Mine offers a mix of articles that reflect my lifestyle. The minimal amount of ads within the magazine show me the new Lexus RX, but are customized to speak to me, without being intrusive. I believe that good journalism helps market good products. When you have branded content, you must know who your audience is and try to create a relationship with that audience. Take some time to study the lifestyle and values of your audience. I always say that we’re no longer in the business of counting numbers. Now we’re in the business of finding customers who count.

DELIVER: What’s the role of “customer” publishing in the marketing mix today?

HUSNI: We’re lagging behind Europe and other countries in custom publishing. I am glad you mentioned customer publishing because I have been one of those people who have been trying to push the American custom publishing industry to add the “E-R” to custom publishing. “Custom publishing” is a good term, but “customer publishing” is an even better choice because now, we are laser-targeting the product to that specific customer. matchmaking

Marketers are in the business of reaching a very specific audience. Who else [but custom publishers] can create something that is specifically targeted to the needs, wants and desires of that customer? That’s why I use the word “matchmaking.” Who is better than a custom publisher at being a matchmaker between the brand and the user of the brand?

DELIVER: In your view, what is the state of catalog marketing? Should marketers think of catalogs as similar to magazines?

HUSNI:Anything you hold in your hands and can view with your eyes evokes a different response in your brain than just looking at your computer screen or touching something. It’s the combination of our sight and sense of touch — those two senses create a completely different reaction that makes us view things differently. So that’s why catalogs are making a comeback. They declined when everybody said, “Oh, let’s put all the catalogs online.” But more and more companies discovered that the more [print] catalogs they cut, the less traffic they pulled to their online sales sites. So they are now using the catalog as the means to put the brand in your hands and then [to get you to] go online to order. Human beings love that sense of ownership. We want to hold something in our hand and say, “This is my Lands’ End catalog,” “This is my Cosmopolitan magazine.” You can never say anything on the Web is yours, including your own Web site. We want the sense of calling it ours; this is mine … showing it, displaying it on our coffee table, throwing it in the recycling bin; doing whatever you want to do with it because it’s yours.

DELIVER: You spoke about the need to engage customers so they immerse themselves in the brand and lose themselves in the pages of a magazine. Is that also true of catalogs?

HUSNI: It’s a shopping experience. I’m one of those few people who do not actually believe in this myth of a separation of “church” (editorial content) and “state” (advertising goals) in magazines. When people pick up a magazine, they are looking as much at the ads as they are looking at the articles. So when it comes to a catalog, it’s one big shopping experience. It’s like you are strolling along Fifth Avenue and you are seeing all these products in front of you. You’re flipping pages until something stops you. Then you either go online to order it or you take a second look or a third look or you show it to somebody. That doesn’t happen on the Internet as easily. [With a print catalog], you can flip through and go back and forth easily without having to squeeze your eyes or tilt your head back to see the screen better or any of that. So it’s not only psychological; it’s physical, too.