Newspapers and Magazines

Gabriele Fischer

You won't find Deutsche Bank Chairman Josef Ackermann on the cover of brand eins magazine. "We prefer to use images like a lone horse to symbolize topics like leadership", explains brand eins founder and editor-in-chief Gabriele Fischer. This is not the only way in which brand eins differs from other business magazines, however, and its readership is growing.

To be honest, it is not all that difficult to make a magazine stand out from the crowd of business publications on German kiosk shelves. A glance at the publications on sale says it all: men in dark suits, some with pinstripe, some without, grace the covers of most of Germany's business press, while data, facts and figures dominate inside. This is characteristic of the business world – serious, matter of fact, and number-oriented. Or rather, this is how the world of business is portrayed in business magazines.

The people behind the figures

Gabriele Fischer, however, believes that business is about more than just figures. "Business is done by people, and thrives on their ideas, their energy, their passion." This is what brand eins is all about. "What we are interested in are the background stories and interrelationships." These economic interrelationships and backgrounds, however, are interwoven with cultural, social and scientific issues. Business, one might say, is dealt with in a holistic manner by brand eins. One example of this is that each issue focuses, among other things, on one main business topic which is illuminated from different sides. In the September 2005 edition on "work", for instance, people are presented who earn little but enjoy their work nonetheless. Another issue discusses the advantages of a general basic income and explains why the level of one's salary is a matter for negotiation rather than a question of fairness.

The monthly magazine, however, has distanced itself not only from the narrow-minded journalistic interpretation of the term "business" but also from the consciously sober style of conventional business reporting. The magazine has in its sights not only business people but also "normal readers", who are best reached through easily comprehensible reporting. The magazine is entertaining without being shallow, and is educational without appearing didactic or moralizing.

This is something which its readership – the majority of whom are young – really appreciate. A study conducted in 2005 by the Mannheim-based market research institute Sigma found that two thirds of brand eins readers are under 40 years old, while 22.5 percent are between the ages of 25 and 29. Many of these readers, the survey revealed, have founded a business of their own. Perhaps this is also one reason why brand eins is so appealing to this group. After all, being an entrepreneur is a characteristic they share with the editor-in-chief who is also the magazine's founder and holds its economic fate in her hands.

The people behind brand eins

Gabriele Fischer, 52, had been deputy editor-in-chief of Manager Magazin since 1992 when in 1999 she was commissioned to develop a new magazine. At the time, the new economy was booming, so the new magazine was given the name "Econy", and subtitled "Business in Motion". Econy was a magazine targeted at a new readership which was felt to be innovative, willing to take risks, and fast. The demise of Econy came equally fast, however, with the Manager Magazin publisher scrapping the project after just two editions.

Gabriele Fischer's editorial team decided to continue to run the magazine independently, publishing two editions themselves. In November 1998 a new partner was then found, a business media publishing house named Verlag für Wirtschaftsmedien, to take over the magazine. The editorial team, which now called itself the "brand eins editorial company", continued the business of editing it, but before long there was a rift between the publishing house and the editors. Less than a year after the Verlag für Wirtschaftsmedien had bought the rights to Econy, the brand eins editorial staff and the publishing house went their separate ways.

The editorial team decided once again to pursue their idea of a business magazine, this time using the name brand eins. Art director Mike Meiré was still on board – a winner of many art awards, he gave brand eins its unmistakeable appearance: clear and tidy pages with lots of white areas, and puristic images stripped to their essentials. On 24 September 1999 the first issue appeared. "We were convinced about our idea and wanted to prove that there was a market for it", says Gabriele Fischer.

brand eins

The IVW (Information Centre for Circulation Analysis) registered close to 90,000 copies sold in the third quarter of 2006. Though this means that brand eins is selling only half as many copies as, for example, the conservative business magazine Capital, the latter, like other such publications, is battling against declining sales. This is not the sort of problem facing the team at brand eins: "for seven years, brand eins has been growing slowly but surely, primarily as a result of word of mouth", says editor-in-chief Gabriele Fischer. At the same time, the magazine is valued not only by its readers, but also by its staff. "We have managed to create a place where people like to work and a magazine for which our colleagues enjoy writing and photographing", says Gabriele Fischer. After all, behind any magazine publisher it is the people who count.