Magazines as Cultural Artifacts

This post inspired by ASME's Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Last 40 Years, an excellent tool for planners.

Magazines are of great use and importance to the strategic planner. We go to the bookstore, expense 5 or 6 of them (BlackBook, Print, Wired, Anthem, The Believer, and Harper's are my favorites), and spend the afternoon pouring over bleeding-edge trends in music, art, fashion, tech, and whatever else we find useful to the refinement of our sense of the world -- the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, per se. This is part of our job as planners -- to understand culture as completely as possible so that we might enable our clients to engage people more resonantly.

Recently in school, I was given the task of resurrecting the GAP brand, and it was a magazine that catalyzed my insight into what the GAP brand truly stands for. The magazine was the 1966 TIME "Person of the Year Issue", and this was the cover:

The Person of the Year in 1966 was "Everyone Twenty-Five and Under." Sounds a bit like a more recent addition to the list.

Anyway, this issue of TIME didn't help me uncover any trends or contemporary cultural hot buttons. In fact, I didn't even open it. But the power of the ideas evoked by this singular image and what it meant in its cultural context led me to an insight that can't be found in the pages of a cool-hunter magazine.

The point here is that planners should look at magazines as rich cultural artifacts that are clear signs of our times, not just harbingers of the cool and the new.