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Identity Crisis: Building and Maintaining a Journal Brand Strategy
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Identity Crisis: Building and Maintaining a Journal Brand Strategy
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JASON POINTE: Hello, thank you for joining us for today's discussion-- Identity Crisis-- Building and Maintaining a Journal Brand Strategy. The fourth event in space 2022 webinar series. I'm Jason Pointe, leader of the SSP education committee's webinars working group. Before we get started, I want to thank SSP's 2022 education program sponsors-- Arpha, JJ Editorial, OpenAthens, Silverchair, 67 Bricks, and Taylor Francis F1000.
JASON POINTE: We're grateful for their support. I also have a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically. Please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with speakers and other participants. This one-hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's event.
JASON POINTE: A quick note on SSP's code of conduct in today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity, and providing an inclusive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination, and hostile conduct. We ask all participants, whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful, and fair manner. At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email.
JASON POINTE: We encourage you to provide feedback to help shape future SSP programming. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce moderator for today's discussion-- Bethanne Dorn, product marketing manager at Research Square. Bethanne has 14 years of marketing and sales experience and has worked with research institutions, including Harvard, Duke, University of Chicago, and UCLA to define and articulate their brands.
JASON POINTE: Over to you BETHANNE.
BETHANNE DORN: Thank you, Jason. It's a pleasure to be with you all today and be participating in this panel on Building and Maintaining a Journal Brand Strategy. I'm joined by fellow marketers across the scholarly publishing industry. And I know I speak for all of us when I say that I'm looking forward to hearing their perspectives and experiences with branding. In today's webinar, we'll begin by hearing directly from the panelists themselves on their background and their expertise.
BETHANNE DORN: And following that introduction, we'll jump right into a series of questions. Finally, I'll open it up to questions in our Q&A section. You can see that Q&A section during the discussion or during our Q&A portion of the panel today. And you'll note that the Q&A section is at the bottom portion of your Zoom screen. Last, please keep those questions to the Q&A time when we start to answer them.
BETHANNE DORN: And I'll open up the floor and see those for [INAUDIBLE] then. So I'm looking forward to getting to know each of our speakers. So let's go ahead and get started. We'll start with Madison Crystal, senior brand, and communications manager, and head writer PLOS. Madison, feel free to take away.
MADISON CRYSTAL: Sharing my slides here for a second. OK. Hi, everyone. I'm Madison. And actually I have just had a title change. So my title is actually the senior manager of brand strategy at PLOS. I've been at a loss for about 5 and 1/2 years now. I started on the contributor experience team, running a lot of training tools, and webinars, and communications with our academic editors and our peer reviewers.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And I've moved into different marketing and communications roles as I've been at PLOS and gotten to know the company a little bit better. The role that I have now is actually a new one for PLOS. And I think it's important for PLOS and to help us realize our ambitions in all of the different things that we're doing. But I also see this importance on brand in the wider marketing and communication space across all industries.
MADISON CRYSTAL: As companies become more available to their audiences in real time, those audiences expect companies to have opinions and ideas that they will share and be open with their audiences. So I think this idea of having brand alignment and a brand strategy is important no matter how it's embedded into an organization. So just to give you a little bit of information about PLOS.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I know a lot of you have heard of us, but for those who haven't. And within this specific context of our brand. PLOS is a non-profit mission-driven publisher. Our mission is to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. And what we mean by that is essentially to help advance open science practices and the principles that make research communication more open, effective, fair, trusted, all of those good things.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So we publish 12 open access journals. They cover all areas of science and medicine in their scope. And our audience is global. We want to work with researchers around the world. We also work with a number of institutions who support researchers. So the researchers are our main audience. They are the people who publish in our journals. They are primarily the people who read our journals, although our content is open to everyone.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And we want everyone to read science, but we were working with other institutions and organizations to help support researchers in publishing open access and performing these different behaviors that make the research process more trustworthy. So my role at PLOS for brand strategy includes a lot of research, measuring insights from our audience, as well as tracking our brand health through different metrics.
MADISON CRYSTAL: Really, what I am trying to do is create the narrative that helps tie all of our work together in how we present that out to our audiences, to put our best foot forward. So like I said, there's a lot of community insights that come into that, a lot of research. I hope to find the positioning and the messaging of different products, as well as our organization as a whole-- so what do we want to say about our values?
MADISON CRYSTAL: What do we want to say about our mission, those kinds of things I help with. I also advise other teams at PLOS. So product and partnership strategy, for example, anything that might have an effect on the way our brand is seen by our audiences or where we need to take into consideration some of the landscape at the time, how that will affect our ability to launch a new product, or to work with a new partner.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I advise in that space. And then, again, obviously marketing communications is a big piece of this role-- how we talk to our audience directly, the ideas that we put forth through a lot of our thought leadership pieces, the events that we engage in, all of that feeds into brand and brand strategy. But I'd say, the one thing that ties the job together is really maintaining consistency and alignment for the organization.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So not just to publishers, any organization has to have this alignment between the mission and values of the organization itself, the audience that they aim to serve, and the products and services that they offer, which feed the needs of that audience, as well as representing the mission and the values of the organization. So that's kind of where a brand strategy comes into play, keeping all of those things together, making sure it's consistent, making sure everything works.
MADISON CRYSTAL: [INAUDIBLE] within that. For some reason, I think one of the images isn't that showing up here. But part of that is maintaining this relationship between the publisher, your overarching brand, where the mission and values are set, and in specific journals, which are often playing to a more unique community. For publishers, I think a lot of us will see that the researchers who engage with us, really, their idea of that brand comes specifically from the journals that they engage with.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So publishers that have a number of different journals in their portfolio. How do you manage that brand relationship, where your researchers have a lot of different experiences? So part of my job as well is to make sure that there is this consistency and alignment between our broader PLOS brand, and our mission where we want to drive change, and the specific journals that work within specific discipline areas to help do that.
MADISON CRYSTAL: There it is. So the slide that I just want to leave you on because it's a fun slide, and just to illustrate how a lot of different brand pieces come together, is this one. So the thing that I want to emphasize is that a brand is not just an organization. It's not just a journal or a logo.
MADISON CRYSTAL: It exists in the mind of your audience. So it's the sum total of their experience with your organization or with your journal. So that means there are elements within that are not able to be controlled by the publisher. We can obviously set out and define our values and the messaging that we want to create. We can adjust our visual representation so that we stand out from our competitors.
MADISON CRYSTAL: But a lot of it boils down to individual experience. And there are a lot of factors within that we don't always have control of, for example, I think COVID reset everybody's expectations because it changed the way that researchers do their work. It changed the needs that they have. And it changed their experience of a brand. So that's something that I think we're all still navigating as the situation develops.
MADISON CRYSTAL: But just to emphasize that there are those pieces that are not always within our control. But we can do our best to learn from our audience, and manage, and adapt to what they want to see from us. That is it for me. And I'll turn it over to my fellow presenters now.
BETHANNE DORN: Thank you, Madison. I'm going to hand it over to Audrey Clark now. Audrey is our senior marketing specialist at Fortress Press. Audrey, take it away.
AUDREY CLARK: Hang on, Let me just share my screen. All right, so a little bit about me. I'm a senior marketing specialist at Fortress Press an imprint of 1517 Media. And on a day to day basis, I develop and execute digital marketing campaigns across email, social, video, and paid search. I'm the only panelist who works in book publishing specifically, but I think when we talk about aligning brand, and core values, and how that informs your marketing strategy and your acquisitions, there is a lot of overlap.
AUDREY CLARK: So hopefully, you will glean something helpful from me as well. And I got into the publishing industry because I love reading and connecting great books to amazing audiences. And I also just love the creativity of marketing. And I enjoy the whole process of brainstorming and talking to my audience.
AUDREY CLARK: To lay the land for you, as we talk more about aligning brand with your core values, I'll tell you a little bit about Fortress Press and 1517 Media. We're the official publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And we've been active for over 200 years as a progressive Christian publisher. And the imprint, Fortress Press, focuses on developing and publishing books for clergy members, advancing scholarship, as well as college students with textbooks and things like that.
AUDREY CLARK: And some of the core aspirations that influence the brand at Fortress Press is to create resources for academic study, professional development, and for individual edification and spiritual growth, as well as to embrace the media of the day to meet people where they are in their lives and in their communities. So how that a core aspiration and core value of 1517 Media distills into Fortress Press is our tagline, scholarship that matters in the academy, in the church, and in the community.
AUDREY CLARK: So we basically want to create content that's relevant to people's lives and what's going on in the world. But we also want it to be accessible for general readers as well as academics. And we want it to be easily discoverable for both of those audiences, for example, I'm not trying to sell you on this, I promise, but it is a good book.
AUDREY CLARK: Our book Black Hands White House, we saw a gap in the literature on the fiscal and physical implications of slavery and the use of enslaved labor to build the nation's capital And using-- well, in creating this book and bringing it to market, we position our brand Fortress as a source for relevant and accessible scholarship about challenges the world is facing.
AUDREY CLARK: My next slide is just some examples of how I use marketing campaigns to sort of further our brand as relevant and accessible scholarship that is accessible to everyone. That might include promoting the author's recent events. We recently did a thematic campaign for Juneteenth. And positioning the author in microdocumentaries, positioning her as an expert to write op-eds, or interviews, or podcasts, or things like that.
AUDREY CLARK: So that was pretty brief. But that's a snapshot about me, some of our values at Fortress Press, and how I align brand identity with core values in my role. And I will pass it over to Ginetta.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Hello, everyone. Good morning. I want to open my slideshow. Oops. First, I have to share the screen, excuse me, and then open the slideshow. What we want to share is this. OK, there we go.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Thank you, everyone. All right so I am the editor of the journal Meridians-- feminism, race, transnationalism, which is published by Duke University Press since 2018. And just very briefly, Meridians was conceptualized, founded, funded, and continues to live at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. As our subtitle indicates, the mission of the journal is to make scholarship by and about women of color central to the production of feminist knowledge, both in and outside the academy, and to consider feminist knowledge production in terms of questions of race and trans nationalism, and both scholarly research based feminist knowledge production, but also creative work from poetry, to prose, to creative nonfiction, and visual work.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Our funding structure, which I think is relevant to this conversation also is that we have been historically largely funded by discretionary moneys from our provost and president's offices. Although I'm pleased to publicly announce here that this spring, we secured a $1 million lead gift to establish an endowment that will secure permanent funding for Meridians forevermore, moving forward.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And that the college has initiated a $3 million endowment funding campaign, which is very exciting. And I take to be part of the successful marketing and branding work that we've been doing over the past five years. We also received the support of the Women and Gender Program here at Smith College. We've collaborated with various student undergraduate research and internship programs, including the Mellon Mays program.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And Duke University Press provides the funding for production and marketing. And we have a revenue sharing agreement with them. But in that vein, Duke University Press does do quite a bit of marketing for us as well. Just very briefly. I am Meridians fourth editor. Our first editor was Kum-Kum Bhamani at University of Santa Barbara.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: She was followed by Myriam Chancy, who's currently at Scripps. And our longest running editor to date was Paula J Giddings, who I'm assuming many of you know, was one of the founders of Black women's studies in the United States and led the journal for over a decade until her retirement in 2017 when I took over. I'm a scholar, a sociologist by training. I'm a scholar of Latin American, Latino studies, specifically Dominican, and Hispanic, Caribbean studies.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: We are advised by an editorial advisory board that is comprised of both Smith and Duke faculty members, who work in our core theme areas-- feminism, race, and transnationalism. And again, all this information is available on our websites. So I'm going to just move quickly through it. But each of our scholars does do transnational, feminist work focused on questions of race, racism, racialization, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: We also have a creative writing advisory board, because as I said, we published both research-based, scholarly, conventional work in some ways and creative writing work alongside one another. And our board is comprised of both Smith-based and Duke based creative writers, poets, et cetera, and literary scholars. As I said, our work ranges from more research-based traditional scholarship, to more innovative and experimental work, ranging from counterpoints which are engagements with theory and debates around semantics and vocabulary.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: The fields that our feminist contributors work within in the trenches, which are reports about activism, either from activists themselves or from scholars who work on those matters. Culture works which ranges from actual creative work to scholars writing about creative work. Memoirs and testimonials, self-explanatory, testifying to questions of race, sexuality, and nationhood, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Media matters in the archives features primary documents, largely from the 20th and 21st century that bring forward little known histories of feminist, anti-racist, transnational activism, and showcases the materials that are available here at the [INAUDIBLE] collection, which is one of the oldest women's history archives in the United States. Interviews and finally states of the field, which are essentially literature reviews rather than book reviews that cover contemporary publications around a specific team related to our subthemes.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Recently, I also put together a 20th Anniversary Reader. And this is related to my marketing and branding efforts because I wanted to showcase that Meridians has been around now for more than 22 years. And it has actually published what has become central pieces in the canons of women's studies, feminist studies, transnational studies, international relations, ethnic and racial studies, and area studies of various kinds-- from Palestinian, to Latin America, to African studies, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And this reader specifically meant to be adapted for classroom use, both undergraduate, and graduate, and as you will see, even in the high school context. And that was very much explicitly intended to market Meridians and to showcase the work that we have been doing for over 20 years now. We are also really grateful to Duke University Press, as I said, our partner in visualizing Meridians work and the work of our authors.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: This is a snapshot from their webpage for our journal. And you can see that they include features like most read, most cited, and latest, which is a phenomenal feature not only in terms of visiblizing Meridians, but central to our mission-- visiblizing the work of women of color, feminist knowledge, production. Whether that's women of color feminist knowledge producers themselves or about those women and their work. So this is very much part of that strategy.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: We have several forthcoming issues that are both curated in-house. Our next issue, which will be mailed out next week is on Black Feminism in the Caribbean and the US. And this was explicitly timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the global George Floyd inspired protests. The following issue inspired both by those protests but also the pandemic, Feminist Mournings, which has been guest edited by two prominent researchers in this field-- Jyoti Puri of Simmons and Kimberly Juanita Brown in Dartmouth.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: BIPOC Europe, also guest edited by two prominent scholars in that area of Black, Indigenous, people of color in Europe-- Nana Osei-Kofi and Shirley Anne Tate. And then finally, Global Indigenous Feminism, which would be forthcoming next year. Also guest edited with Basuli Deb and myself, in-house. Incorporating guest editors from across the United States and, increasingly, the world, is another strategy for visiblizing Meridians, and for marketing and branding what we do, and how we do it in collaboration, primarily, with women of color, feminist knowledge producers So just briefly, I've indicated some of the work that we do.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: I'll show you some slides moving forward. I've also instituted two article awards. One for the best article, a research based article in an existing volume. And one is an open call process for best creative writing in honor of Elizabeth Alexander. We have implemented an on-the-line multimedia complimentary content website feature. We have been doing virtual volume celebrations inspired by the pandemic in fall 2020, where we bring together all the contributors to a particular volume, so a conversation about their work, which has been a lovely way, again, of generating visibility, but also of creating conversations, not just between the pages of the journal but actually between the contributors.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: We've been collaborating on professional development exchanges with Feminist Africa, which is based in Ghana and is also a 20 year plus project. And with [INAUDIBLE] which is a feminist journal in the Dominican Republic, again, by way of globally visiblizing our work and our collaborative feminist knowledge production commitment. We have been used by the NWSA Feminist K through 12 Teacher Training program since 2016.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: NWSA folks like K Wise Whitehead, who is the current president of the National Women's Studies Association, has been using a special issue that she guest edited Meridians to do, K through 12 Feminist Teacher Training, on how to use gender analytics and feminist rubrics in K through 12 education. We have developed an extensive line of swag for authors, reviewers, et cetera. We present every year on Meridians project panel, not only at NWSA but also at other cognate conferences such as Latin American Studies, Study of Women and Gender, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And of course, we are currently participating in the creation of a federation of feminist journals and journal editors, which is an international group. So just quickly, this was the first Paula J Giddings Best Article Award. And again, this information was all on our website. We've been giving out the award for the past four years. The winners come from across the United States, from both tier one and lesser known colleges because again, the intent is to showcase scholarship by and about women of color feminist knowledge producers.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Elizabeth Alexander Award, this is our fourth year giving that award. The on-the-line feature, again, I invite you to go to the website-- multimedia compliments that range from videos, to primary documents that are clickable and available on the website, to audio, to snippets of film, et cetera. This is an image of the issue that was used for that K through 12 Education, which was the winner of the 2020 Exceptional Merit in Media Award, by the way.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: As you can see, it's a pedagogical resource for K through 12 teachers and scholars to teach feminisms in their classroom, again, bringing Meridians to younger audiences. We developed an extensive swag collection that is intended to keep Meridians literally on your desk and in your hands-- from mugs, to pens and pencils, to the slider cover on your camera, and your computer, sticky wallets for your iPhone, lanyard, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: With the idea, again, of reminding folks that Meridians is here. We've had an extensive social media presence from Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Bookshop, YouTube. And I invite everyone to follow us right now if you don't already, as well as to sign up for our newsletter, and to contact us, which is probably the most important thing.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: All right, thank you all. And I'm happy to answer any questions.
BETHANNE DORN: Thanks Ginetta, that was awesome. And thanks, Madison and Audrey as well. From there, we're going to jump into some questions that I've prepared, that I think you can each speak to from your differing perspectives-- from representing a publisher, a journal, a book publisher. And I think, we'll start out with-- all three of you talked about how your organizations are both mission-driven and values-- driven. What I want to know is two parts.
BETHANNE DORN: First, how did you first identify those core values that inspired everything? Then second, how do you express those values to different audiences and how?
MADISON CRYSTAL: Should I go first?
BETHANNE DORN: Madison, yeah. Jump on.
MADISON CRYSTAL: OK, so I'll say how we defined and established our values, a lot of that came from when PLOS was founded, about 20 years ago. So PLOS was founded as part of this movement, and one of the really early actors in advocating for open access publishing, the idea that anyone should have access to the research that is being conducted, a lot of it being funded by taxpayers, that shouldn't be behind a paywall for readers.
MADISON CRYSTAL: Everyone should be able to use and read those pieces. So a lot of our values are based on that, the increasing accessibility of research communication, increasing the transparency of it. And so as we've evolved and gotten-- the marketplace has evolved. Open access has become much more of a bigger thing than it was when we started. So the values that we set for ourselves are really asking ourselves, what do we need to embody in order to achieve our mission to continue transforming scientific communication and the way it's communicated, in ways that are more trustworthy, reliable, accessible, and fair for everyone else.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So within that, we know we need to earn the trust of our researchers first. And we need to demonstrate the transparency that we're asking them to practice. We need to demonstrate that as an organization. So we make a lot of our decisions transparent. A lot of our financials even are transparent. We've participated in the Plan S Price Transparency Framework, helping to further those goals, as well as committing to very transparent goals around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So those are how we've defined our goals. At the individual, I think journal level, as I was saying before, like those need to be complementary. So each of our journals will take those core values. And they will never change. All of our journals need to support transparency, diversity, inclusion, building trust. And they do that in a way that is specific to those communities.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So for example, if we see at a journal like Global Public Health is a journal we launched last year. And that had a very specific mission to include more diverse voices, to bring the conversation around public health and global public health, more specifically, really back to an actual global audience and global experts. So we needed to really make sure that journal was a representative of the authors and researchers that we hoped would read it.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So we intentionally looked for a very diverse editorial board. And we also needed to make it possible for those researchers to publish with us. So that meant coming up with a new business model that was more regionally equitable, and had the ability to partner with institutions, and make publication costs for authors free, in some cases, and to make the institutional partnership model itself regionally equitable, so that we were charging a lower cost for lower income regions.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So yeah.
BETHANNE DORN: That's a lot. And what I think is amazing is not just about how you're expressing your core values, but also how you're living the out, and like you mentioned, spinning off new business models. Your brand strategy is actually a reflection of the whole business strategy itself. And I think the closer those two are aligned like you mentioned in your introduction, the better everything flows.
BETHANNE DORN: It's much more easy to speak to that when everyone is on the same page. This is why we do what we do. This is how we speak to it.
MADISON CRYSTAL: Yeah, absolutely. I think authenticity is really important and very-- the audience that we have these days is very sensitive to that. So you can't just say something while you're doing something else. Your audience is going to know, hey, you're not living your values.
BETHANNE DORN: Yeah, I want to check with Audrey and Ginetta as well. But before we do, Madison I'm curious, do you, as new people are onboarded or as perhaps new brands are spun up in PLOS, do you do internal training around the history of the brand?
MADISON CRYSTAL: Yeah, so we do a little bit. There is an onboarding process for new staff, and as well as, I think, every time we work on a new brand, a new journal, a new product that we're offering. Part of my job is to bring that history into it. So I'm this repository for information about PLOS. That helps that I've been there six years. And work with-- actually, the people that I work with on my team, a lot of them have been with PLOS for 10 years.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So it's like, oh yes, we can all point to things that have happened a few years ago. How is that representative of us now? But it is important to have new staff understand where we've been, why we're in the specific moment now, and why we care about the things that we do care about. So PLOS, we have a lot of different departments, a lot of different work that we're working on. So what I like to do is bring that together into this story for PLOS, which is no matter what you're working on, you're working towards making research more open, effective, and fair.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So everything that we do feeds into that. But yeah, absolutely, it is important to keep that history and goals in mind so that everything is connected.
BETHANNE DORN: Yeah, that's essential. Speaking of history, so Audrey 1517 has been around for a long time. And Fortress is not a new publishing group. How do you define your core values there and how do you express those to diverse audiences?
AUDREY CLARK: Yeah, I think Fortress defined their core values based on the larger organizations, thoughts around that in terms of relevance and wanting to meet people where they are, no matter where they are, and no matter what point in their lives that they're at. And I see that happening when we segment into our three audiences because fortress serves the ministry, audience, the academic audience, as well as the higher academia with textbooks and the like.
AUDREY CLARK: So I'll use ministry as an example. I think we create content based on what we know our audience will need and what they value. And it's all feeds back into itself. We have our values, but we want to stay in touch with what the audience is valuing and what they're talking about so that we can continue to create relevant content. And to that end, we actually have a series called Working Creature, that is a specific collection that preachers can go to, so we're a resource for them.
AUDREY CLARK: So that they can go to if they want to know how to talk about the headlines, when something terrible is happening, or if they want to know how to talk about Christian nationalism. They can even pull from outside of our working preacher line and grab a book about that. So I think it's really staying in touch with your audience and it's not always talking to them.
AUDREY CLARK: And then what was the other part of your question, sorry?
BETHANNE DORN: I think that's great, like understanding both your values and then the values of your audiences. And seeing how those two intermingle. And content creation is no small matter, being able to understand what they want, and being able to express it across lots of different channels, whether that's social media, or like you said, new books, blogs, et cetera. Ginetta, I'm curious, so Meridians is completely mission driven from what you publish, to who you hire.
BETHANNE DORN: How did that get started? How do you define your core values? Has it evolved over time? How do you make space for that?
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Yeah, thank you. Well, as I quickly glossed over, we started here at Smith College by what used to be called Women's Studies Faculty, now it's Study of Women and Gender, who realized early on that intersectionality was not being well represented in the existing women's studies journals. And those existing journals were only 10, 15 years old because women's studies as only been around since the late '60s, early '70s.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And we're talking about, basically, a mid-1990s moment when these four faculty-- one of whom was actually Elizabeth Alexander, which is why the award was named in her honor. She was here at Smith for a period of time and helped establish the Poetry Center. The others were Susan Van Dyne, who was a nationally, at the time, recognized consultant to other colleges in establishing women's studies programs.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Nancy supported [INAUDIBLE] who was a scholar of feminism in Latin America. And then [INAUDIBLE] Ferguson who was a scholar of African-American gender studies And they were four colleagues here, who helped establish women's studies, and were promoting women's studies and really feminist work, but realized that, as I said, that women of color, feminist knowledge production was not getting its due in the existing journals.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So that was a problem. Secondly, related to that, that existing feminist and women's studies journals, in a way necessarily, because of the nature of the academy at the time and having to establish the intellectual validity of women's studies, they hewed very closely to conventional research-based scholarship. And didn't really allow room for other more creative feminist forms of knowledge production, such as creative writing, visual art, performing arts, et cetera, which have been central to women of color feminist knowledge production projects and practices historically, precisely because of exclusionary politics.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So they felt that this journal would have to do those things, center women of color feminist knowledge producers, center the mutual constitutedness of rigorous, intellectual, conventional work and creative work in feminist knowledge production, coming from a women of color location. And then thirdly, transnationalism, understanding that women of color in the US is necessarily a transnational global internationalist, at the time, we could have even said third-worldist orientation that recognizes geopolitics as part and parcel of these projects, that moves beyond a US centric provincial orientation and frame to understanding feminism, race, and transnationalism.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So they approached the president at the time, who was the first Black president at Smith College, Ruth Simmons, who was a visionary in many, many ways. And who immediately supported the project and secured what was at the time preliminary grant-based funding and then continued to fund it through her offices. So it really has always been a very mission driven project. It was born that way. It's come of age that way.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And it's maturing that way. And I think in fact, even expanding its reach. And that's the hope. That's the goal that I've been striving for anyway. So thank you for the question.
BETHANNE DORN: Yeah, of course. I'm also curious-- so we've talked about how we have defined values for each of our respective organizations, are there moments where as the champions of the brand or the keepers of the brand, that you've noticed that you're out of alignment with your organization's mission, and values, and how it's being expressed, and how there needs to be an update?
BETHANNE DORN:
MADISON CRYSTAL: I can take a stab at that one. I think we haven't really noticed anything that seriously out of alignment at PLOS. Although I would say there is more of a risk of having different pieces of our publishing operation be out of sync. So for example, a lot of the marketing and communications that we do, it's very important to manage the tone of voice that we're using, the words that we're using to make sure that we're representing PLOS consistently.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And when you have teams where you have several different writers, working on different campaigns without necessarily everybody seeing what each other is doing, you can sometimes have-- you're sending out one email campaign that's about probably to maybe researchers who have never practiced open science before. And what you're saying there is more encouraging, more trust building, trying to get them to see why these practices are good.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And speaking to the needs that they have. Sometimes real fears about how is my work going to be co-opted if I practice open science? Like is this really reliable? And then you have maybe other campaigns where we're talking to researchers who have been practicing open science for a long time. And they want to see us go further. They say, yeah.
MADISON CRYSTAL: All research should do this. Everyone should do this. So what I think we've seen is when those two conflict, when those audiences overlap. You've got the one end where you have some researchers thinking, well, why are you talking about all these fears? Those aren't real. Those aren't-- and we're like, well, yeah. But actually a lot of researchers have them.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So I think there a piece of it that's just making sure everything is in step in that-- you have to talk to different audiences, different ways, but you also have to keep those streams in alignment so that when someone has-- someone sees the different streams, because they're going to, I mean it's going to overlap. It all makes sense in the end. So I think that's one of the more difficult pieces to manage.
MADISON CRYSTAL:
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: On this, Audrey is ready to jump in. I'll just add that, I think the biggest challenge for us is that we have a commitment to transnationalism. But the fact is that we're US-based. And we are a for-profit publication. Our partner Duke University Press has-- we have to generate revenue. And that does conflict with the core ethic of access in terms of transnationalism.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So one of the ways that Duke has been an excellent partner in navigating those conflicts is through, and I forgot to mention, it but through their developing countries initiative, where they allow us to select an issue, each volume, that will be, not open access, but free access for a period of time, anywhere from three months to six months. So for example, Our feminist African cartography issue was free access for over three months.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And was downloaded many thousands of times. I think it's something like 2,500 times from the continent, from Africa because we can track who's been downloading it where. Which is exactly as it should be because the contributors to that issue, many of them were based in Africa. But some were African diasporic scholars in the United States writing about their African countries of expertise. So folks in those countries should be able to read what is being said about their locations, their histories, et cetera, their politics.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So that free access was a way of navigating the tension between the need to generate revenue as a for-profit venture and really living our mission, which is transnational feminist knowledge production and collaboration. Similarly, publishing in languages other than English, and other than European languages, to include global languages such as Mapuche, or character based languages-- Arabic, or Chinese, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And having that be part of the journal. Related to that, having reviewers who are located outside the US reviewing work about their locations, to, again, make sure that this is truly a transnational project not just US-based, while also managing, and this is a key thing, and I'll hand it over to Audrey. The fact that we are very sensitive to sustaining the gold standard of double-blind peer review, because one of our missions is to grow the pipeline of feminist women of color scholars, who get tenure, and who are tenurable, and get promotion.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And that requires that we align with the conventional academic norms of rigorous double-blind peer review. So how do we do that when very often conventional means, white serving, androcentric, eurocentric, US-centric? We do that by making sure that our peer reviewers are actually experts in what our scholars are writing about. And that often means other women of color feminist knowledge producers but in the US and outside.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So I think those are some of the ways that we try to manage the tensions between the pragmatic context that we're in and our values and mission. Audrey, I hand it over to you.
AUDREY CLARK: I think something that, actually, had a conference last week, someone mentioned is our goal is accessibility. And that doesn't just mean making it digestible for general readers, it also means actually making it accessible like audio books, or books in Braille, or things like that. So that is something-- that is feedback we have gotten that is contrary to our brand alignment. But we take that feedback and we're incorporating it.
AUDREY CLARK: Like we are starting to ramp-up doing more audiobooks. And we're looking at how we can do it more economically for us because even though we are a non-profit, we do still have to hit certain numbers. So it's something that we're constantly working towards, in terms of how we can better align ourselves with accessibility.
BETHANNE DORN: Yeah, I love that. You both touched on, Ginetta and Audrey, that the realities of living within a context, having to meet numbers, having to-- the business case behind why your brand exists, even if in a non-profit environment and reaching your audience in new ways. And having them all align on your mission. And I think that's so important to pull out because you have different stakeholders.
BETHANNE DORN: You have different groups that you have to speak to. And your brand has to be able to encompass all of it. And it's great to see that you're thinking about that proactively. We have a lot of great questions that have been submitted in the Q&A section. And we have a little bit of time left. So I want to jump to those. We may not be able to answer all of them, but I'm going to do my best to get as many asked.
BETHANNE DORN: And we'll go from there. So one that I think that all three of us can speak to, or all three of you can speak to, [INAUDIBLE] has anyone been through a rebrand? And how was it decided that there needs to be a change? And more importantly, who led that change? As anyone experienced that? GINETTA E.B.
CANDELARIO: We have not.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I can speak to this a little bit. So PLOS has, I will say, reinvigorated our brand a couple of times. A full rebrand, I think, is a drastic measure that you probably don't want to take as a publisher unless you have some very serious concerns within your audience. So a full rebrand is redefining yourself, potentially changing names, and logos, and really who you are. But PLOS reinvigorated our brand, I think, just to keep pace with, I mean any modern design styles.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I think if you Google PLOS, you can see iterations of our logo. And we still have this internal Slack channel. We're like, oh, they're using the small o, which is 10 years out of date. And so I think part of it is just keeping pace with modern design, the way that people talk, the way that organizations interact with their audience. We did a-- our most recent re-invigoration of our brand was a few years ago, I think 2019, where we wanted to-- we changed our logo to incorporate more colors, more vibrancy.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And a lot of that is just to show that we are a vibrant organization. We want to show the excitement behind the science and the different ways that we're working to transform science communication. And we also, within that, we looked at our messaging and the voice that we use. And we decided well this really needs to be more personable and approachable because we are not-- we don't want to be the kind of publisher that tells everyone what to do.
MADISON CRYSTAL: We don't want to be this authority figure. We want to be welcoming and open to our audiences. So that was an element that we also changed, and also really just thinking about our marketing and brand strategy. How do we personify ourselves as that partner for researchers, more so than an authority figure. So that led to other events that we've led. So one of them was this summit on open science, where we invited different speakers and researchers to attend and talk through different issues within open science.
MADISON CRYSTAL: But it was really a community-led event with community speakers. And we've tried more to raise those voices of researchers, and people, experts within the space through our channels so that we are-- we're really this conduit for researchers. And we have our mission. We want to partner with us to change. And so for who led that, I would say that came from multiple different directions.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I think our CMO was the main driver there. But also the entire marketing and communications team really worked together to figure out, what do we want ourselves to look like? What values do we want to personify? How do we do that? So yeah, hope that answers some of that question.
AUDREY CLARK: I myself have never been through a complete rebrand. But I think if you're going to decide-- how you decide there needs to be a change is through a brand audit and just constantly talking to your audience. But as far as who leads the change, I really think everyone, like upper leadership. Your upper leadership team needs to all be on the same page because if you don't have buy-in from your upper leadership, it's going to be really challenging to make that change to your brand and have it go through every communication that you put out from product development to your marketing team.
AUDREY CLARK:
BETHANNE DORN: Do you have a regular brand audit calendar or rhythm that you go through?
AUDREY CLARK: Not yet, that is something that I'm working on. But I do make a point to engage with people on social media, our customers on social media, and especially at conferences. I went to a library conference last week. And I'm going to LA this week. And I'm going to make a point to sort of talk to librarians and see what their needs are. And that's how I found out that librarians want to be able to get audio books for all of their students and professors on campus
BETHANNE DORN: So it sounds like it's a balance between listening to your audience, and making sure your existing brand is meeting that, as well as reviewing what's out there, and making sure that your brand is consistent and speaking to your audience. So to Madison's point earlier, that the voice and tone is consistent across different publishing groups or journals. And then, logo changes, visual updates, making sure that's consistent as well.
BETHANNE DORN: All of that folds into having a cohesive brand experience. That's great. We have a number of other questions that I want to get to as well. It looks like we have a couple answered. Madison, one directed towards you. You talked a little bit about brand health for publisher and journals. Under PLOS, is there a North Star metric of brand health for the journal, or would that be the publisher?
BETHANNE DORN: And how do you impact that metric [INAUDIBLE]??
MADISON CRYSTAL: Yeah, so I will say a lot of brands consider a net promoter score to be a North Star. I think simply because it's easy to get that net promoter. Score I like a more robust set of metrics. I think that's-- I mean, that score will tell you how likely your audiences are to recommend you or talk badly about you, which is a good measure of brand health. But it doesn't tell you why. And it doesn't tell you what elements of your brand are doing really well.
MADISON CRYSTAL: It doesn't tell you whether your audience likes you, but maybe sees you completely differently than how you think you're being seen. So I think Audrey has touched on this a lot as well. A lot of it is about engaging with the community. So we have a number of different ways that we do that. We have our editorial boards for our journals, for example, our all academic researchers who are actively working in the space.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And we have staff who meet with them regularly to understand what they want to see from the journal, what they're hearing from their communities, to make those changes at our journals happen. We also have more standardized marketing tools that we use to do this. We do a lot of social listening using different tools on social media to track conversations that are happening around our brand.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I have set up this yearly survey to do this brand audit that Audrey mentioned, asking targeted questions about different elements of our brand, and measuring over time how that changes. And we started that with really this open ended survey that asks researchers to tell us what they thought of us because we wanted to know if there was something in there that we hadn't thought of. So if everyone is saying, oh, I really like this piece of your brand.
MADISON CRYSTAL: We're like, oh, OK. That's a small thing, but maybe we should make it bigger. So that survey, measuring changes over time. And specifically finding ways to ask your audience about the values that you think you're representing I think are important to complement that just one numerical score that you can give yourself. GINETTA E.B.
CANDELARIO: So we've
CANDELARIO: issued surveys to both our reviewers and our contributors through our editorial management submission system, essentially asking them these questions about the process, the journal, et cetera, et cetera, to collect their feedback. And just keep it in mind, as we move forward. But if we were going to go through a rebranding, it would have to be really editorial advisory board driven. And I think it would require a pretty expensive conversation.
CANDELARIO:
BETHANNE DORN: Yeah, I think that's such a smart thing to point out that. There needs to be a marriage between both quantitative and qualitative data. So your NPS score can tell you some, but you need that qualitative data, hearing directly from folks to fill in the details, know the full story. And then Ginetta, like you said, reaching out directly. Consistently having surveys. Consistently listening I think is the best way to know how your brand is landing.
BETHANNE DORN: And what, if anything, needs to be updated. I want to end on a little fun question. I think like one. Ginetta, you've already done a great job of answering this already. So thank you. Folks can look in the answered section of the Q&A portion of Zoom as well. What kind of swag do reviewers, or does anybody enjoy, what they find interesting, and what you feel like is the best thing to use?
BETHANNE DORN: So Ginetta, I'll have you start. And the other two can jump in as well.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Yeah, I say all of it, actually. And this is actually also a great program, project for our interns. Our student interns have just been phenomenal at preparing our swag because they know what they would pick up. So everything from our mugs. We have several different kinds, which always includes one of our quotes from Ruth. Pens and pencils.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Our color purple. I didn't say it. But purple is our official unofficial color for Meridians. And so I had it consistently on pretty much everything that we do. The My new favorite one is my camera slider, which is also purple, which literally keeps us front and center.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Just thinking in terms of the psychology, that I literally want us to be in hand at every-- and visible like every possible moment. So that when you get, for example, the invitation to review, you say, oh, yeah. I want to do this for Meridians. Or as the author, or our board members, even when I invited people onto our board, or alarms for development purposes, as I said, we're in a capital campaign.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: I send out swag boxes with our 20th Anniversary Reader and these Meridians branded goodies. And they have all just been really positively received. The students tend to like things like the sticky wallets for their phone, which again, is great because your phones are perennially with you. So Meridians is also then just circulating through campus and through the world quite a bit. So nothing has bombed yet.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO:
MADISON CRYSTAL: I will say, for PLOS, we've gotten some weird requests for swag. Our t-shirts have always been amazing. We have an amazing graphic designer who has worked with PLOS for 10 years. And she's been in charge of our visual brand. So we have this like collectible PLOS t-shirts. People are looking for the ones that are out of print that we used to use.
MADISON CRYSTAL: But we also get requests, I think one of the fun ones for me is we have a journal called PLOS ONE. So some of our editors, when they're having a new child have requested, hey, is there a PLOS onesie? So apparently, that's in desire. But I think the t-shirts for us are the big one because it is something that can be vibrant, and fun, and hopefully something that people use for a long time.
MADISON CRYSTAL: We don't like to do too much of the other stuff that we're worried people put in their conference bag and then never use again. But I think the t-shirts are a fun one when we have the opportunity to do that
AUDREY CLARK: And for me, Fortress mostly does pens right now. But I've seen, at my previous publisher, Berman and Littlefield, we did crab mallets for ALA, because it happens in DC. And they're are DC publishers. The crab mallets and mambo sauce as our chatzky. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it was great. They flew off the shelves.
AUDREY CLARK: And we've also done sunglasses before. And people seem to love those, especially, in Maryland summer. And then, I don't think we're actually going to keep making these. But our editorial director made a Fortress branded bookmark in his woodshop, in his woodworking shop. So a premium bookmark goes a long way too.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: That's great.
BETHANNE DORN: I love these ideas. Keeping things front and center. Keeping things usable, but also something that's really unique, that speaks to what it is you do like a bookmark. Thanks everyone so much for your answers. Thanks so much everyone that attended in for questions. We're right on time. I'm going to hand it back Jason to wrap us up.
JASON POINTE: All right, thank you everybody for attending today's webinar. And thank you also to the panelists for an engaging discussion. And of course, thanks to our 2022 education sponsors-- ARPHA, J&J Editorial, OpenAthens, SILVERCHAIR, 67 Bricks, and Taylor&Francis F1000. You will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback to help us pick topics for future events.
JASON POINTE: And please, check the SSP website for information on upcoming events such as those shown here, including the SSP Training Series, virtual innovation showcase, and Ask the Experts panel on Ethics and Publishing. Today's discussion was recorded. And all registrants will receive a link to the recording when it's posted on the SS website. This concludes our session today. GINETTA E.B.
CANDELARIO: Thank you.
CANDELARIO: Thank you all.
AUDREY CLARK: Thanks, everyone.
Segment:0 .
JASON POINTE: Hello, thank you for joining us for today's discussion-- Identity Crisis-- Building and Maintaining a Journal Brand Strategy. The fourth event in space 2022 webinar series. I'm Jason Pointe, leader of the SSP education committee's webinars working group. Before we get started, I want to thank SSP's 2022 education program sponsors-- Arpha, JJ Editorial, OpenAthens, Silverchair, 67 Bricks, and Taylor Francis F1000.
JASON POINTE: We're grateful for their support. I also have a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically. Please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with speakers and other participants. This one-hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's event.
JASON POINTE: A quick note on SSP's code of conduct in today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity, and providing an inclusive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination, and hostile conduct. We ask all participants, whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful, and fair manner. At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email.
JASON POINTE: We encourage you to provide feedback to help shape future SSP programming. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce moderator for today's discussion-- Bethanne Dorn, product marketing manager at Research Square. Bethanne has 14 years of marketing and sales experience and has worked with research institutions, including Harvard, Duke, University of Chicago, and UCLA to define and articulate their brands.
JASON POINTE: Over to you BETHANNE.
BETHANNE DORN: Thank you, Jason. It's a pleasure to be with you all today and be participating in this panel on Building and Maintaining a Journal Brand Strategy. I'm joined by fellow marketers across the scholarly publishing industry. And I know I speak for all of us when I say that I'm looking forward to hearing their perspectives and experiences with branding. In today's webinar, we'll begin by hearing directly from the panelists themselves on their background and their expertise.
BETHANNE DORN: And following that introduction, we'll jump right into a series of questions. Finally, I'll open it up to questions in our Q&A section. You can see that Q&A section during the discussion or during our Q&A portion of the panel today. And you'll note that the Q&A section is at the bottom portion of your Zoom screen. Last, please keep those questions to the Q&A time when we start to answer them.
BETHANNE DORN: And I'll open up the floor and see those for [INAUDIBLE] then. So I'm looking forward to getting to know each of our speakers. So let's go ahead and get started. We'll start with Madison Crystal, senior brand, and communications manager, and head writer PLOS. Madison, feel free to take away.
MADISON CRYSTAL: Sharing my slides here for a second. OK. Hi, everyone. I'm Madison. And actually I have just had a title change. So my title is actually the senior manager of brand strategy at PLOS. I've been at a loss for about 5 and 1/2 years now. I started on the contributor experience team, running a lot of training tools, and webinars, and communications with our academic editors and our peer reviewers.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And I've moved into different marketing and communications roles as I've been at PLOS and gotten to know the company a little bit better. The role that I have now is actually a new one for PLOS. And I think it's important for PLOS and to help us realize our ambitions in all of the different things that we're doing. But I also see this importance on brand in the wider marketing and communication space across all industries.
MADISON CRYSTAL: As companies become more available to their audiences in real time, those audiences expect companies to have opinions and ideas that they will share and be open with their audiences. So I think this idea of having brand alignment and a brand strategy is important no matter how it's embedded into an organization. So just to give you a little bit of information about PLOS.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I know a lot of you have heard of us, but for those who haven't. And within this specific context of our brand. PLOS is a non-profit mission-driven publisher. Our mission is to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. And what we mean by that is essentially to help advance open science practices and the principles that make research communication more open, effective, fair, trusted, all of those good things.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So we publish 12 open access journals. They cover all areas of science and medicine in their scope. And our audience is global. We want to work with researchers around the world. We also work with a number of institutions who support researchers. So the researchers are our main audience. They are the people who publish in our journals. They are primarily the people who read our journals, although our content is open to everyone.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And we want everyone to read science, but we were working with other institutions and organizations to help support researchers in publishing open access and performing these different behaviors that make the research process more trustworthy. So my role at PLOS for brand strategy includes a lot of research, measuring insights from our audience, as well as tracking our brand health through different metrics.
MADISON CRYSTAL: Really, what I am trying to do is create the narrative that helps tie all of our work together in how we present that out to our audiences, to put our best foot forward. So like I said, there's a lot of community insights that come into that, a lot of research. I hope to find the positioning and the messaging of different products, as well as our organization as a whole-- so what do we want to say about our values?
MADISON CRYSTAL: What do we want to say about our mission, those kinds of things I help with. I also advise other teams at PLOS. So product and partnership strategy, for example, anything that might have an effect on the way our brand is seen by our audiences or where we need to take into consideration some of the landscape at the time, how that will affect our ability to launch a new product, or to work with a new partner.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I advise in that space. And then, again, obviously marketing communications is a big piece of this role-- how we talk to our audience directly, the ideas that we put forth through a lot of our thought leadership pieces, the events that we engage in, all of that feeds into brand and brand strategy. But I'd say, the one thing that ties the job together is really maintaining consistency and alignment for the organization.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So not just to publishers, any organization has to have this alignment between the mission and values of the organization itself, the audience that they aim to serve, and the products and services that they offer, which feed the needs of that audience, as well as representing the mission and the values of the organization. So that's kind of where a brand strategy comes into play, keeping all of those things together, making sure it's consistent, making sure everything works.
MADISON CRYSTAL: [INAUDIBLE] within that. For some reason, I think one of the images isn't that showing up here. But part of that is maintaining this relationship between the publisher, your overarching brand, where the mission and values are set, and in specific journals, which are often playing to a more unique community. For publishers, I think a lot of us will see that the researchers who engage with us, really, their idea of that brand comes specifically from the journals that they engage with.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So publishers that have a number of different journals in their portfolio. How do you manage that brand relationship, where your researchers have a lot of different experiences? So part of my job as well is to make sure that there is this consistency and alignment between our broader PLOS brand, and our mission where we want to drive change, and the specific journals that work within specific discipline areas to help do that.
MADISON CRYSTAL: There it is. So the slide that I just want to leave you on because it's a fun slide, and just to illustrate how a lot of different brand pieces come together, is this one. So the thing that I want to emphasize is that a brand is not just an organization. It's not just a journal or a logo.
MADISON CRYSTAL: It exists in the mind of your audience. So it's the sum total of their experience with your organization or with your journal. So that means there are elements within that are not able to be controlled by the publisher. We can obviously set out and define our values and the messaging that we want to create. We can adjust our visual representation so that we stand out from our competitors.
MADISON CRYSTAL: But a lot of it boils down to individual experience. And there are a lot of factors within that we don't always have control of, for example, I think COVID reset everybody's expectations because it changed the way that researchers do their work. It changed the needs that they have. And it changed their experience of a brand. So that's something that I think we're all still navigating as the situation develops.
MADISON CRYSTAL: But just to emphasize that there are those pieces that are not always within our control. But we can do our best to learn from our audience, and manage, and adapt to what they want to see from us. That is it for me. And I'll turn it over to my fellow presenters now.
BETHANNE DORN: Thank you, Madison. I'm going to hand it over to Audrey Clark now. Audrey is our senior marketing specialist at Fortress Press. Audrey, take it away.
AUDREY CLARK: Hang on, Let me just share my screen. All right, so a little bit about me. I'm a senior marketing specialist at Fortress Press an imprint of 1517 Media. And on a day to day basis, I develop and execute digital marketing campaigns across email, social, video, and paid search. I'm the only panelist who works in book publishing specifically, but I think when we talk about aligning brand, and core values, and how that informs your marketing strategy and your acquisitions, there is a lot of overlap.
AUDREY CLARK: So hopefully, you will glean something helpful from me as well. And I got into the publishing industry because I love reading and connecting great books to amazing audiences. And I also just love the creativity of marketing. And I enjoy the whole process of brainstorming and talking to my audience.
AUDREY CLARK: To lay the land for you, as we talk more about aligning brand with your core values, I'll tell you a little bit about Fortress Press and 1517 Media. We're the official publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And we've been active for over 200 years as a progressive Christian publisher. And the imprint, Fortress Press, focuses on developing and publishing books for clergy members, advancing scholarship, as well as college students with textbooks and things like that.
AUDREY CLARK: And some of the core aspirations that influence the brand at Fortress Press is to create resources for academic study, professional development, and for individual edification and spiritual growth, as well as to embrace the media of the day to meet people where they are in their lives and in their communities. So how that a core aspiration and core value of 1517 Media distills into Fortress Press is our tagline, scholarship that matters in the academy, in the church, and in the community.
AUDREY CLARK: So we basically want to create content that's relevant to people's lives and what's going on in the world. But we also want it to be accessible for general readers as well as academics. And we want it to be easily discoverable for both of those audiences, for example, I'm not trying to sell you on this, I promise, but it is a good book.
AUDREY CLARK: Our book Black Hands White House, we saw a gap in the literature on the fiscal and physical implications of slavery and the use of enslaved labor to build the nation's capital And using-- well, in creating this book and bringing it to market, we position our brand Fortress as a source for relevant and accessible scholarship about challenges the world is facing.
AUDREY CLARK: My next slide is just some examples of how I use marketing campaigns to sort of further our brand as relevant and accessible scholarship that is accessible to everyone. That might include promoting the author's recent events. We recently did a thematic campaign for Juneteenth. And positioning the author in microdocumentaries, positioning her as an expert to write op-eds, or interviews, or podcasts, or things like that.
AUDREY CLARK: So that was pretty brief. But that's a snapshot about me, some of our values at Fortress Press, and how I align brand identity with core values in my role. And I will pass it over to Ginetta.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Hello, everyone. Good morning. I want to open my slideshow. Oops. First, I have to share the screen, excuse me, and then open the slideshow. What we want to share is this. OK, there we go.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Thank you, everyone. All right so I am the editor of the journal Meridians-- feminism, race, transnationalism, which is published by Duke University Press since 2018. And just very briefly, Meridians was conceptualized, founded, funded, and continues to live at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. As our subtitle indicates, the mission of the journal is to make scholarship by and about women of color central to the production of feminist knowledge, both in and outside the academy, and to consider feminist knowledge production in terms of questions of race and trans nationalism, and both scholarly research based feminist knowledge production, but also creative work from poetry, to prose, to creative nonfiction, and visual work.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Our funding structure, which I think is relevant to this conversation also is that we have been historically largely funded by discretionary moneys from our provost and president's offices. Although I'm pleased to publicly announce here that this spring, we secured a $1 million lead gift to establish an endowment that will secure permanent funding for Meridians forevermore, moving forward.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And that the college has initiated a $3 million endowment funding campaign, which is very exciting. And I take to be part of the successful marketing and branding work that we've been doing over the past five years. We also received the support of the Women and Gender Program here at Smith College. We've collaborated with various student undergraduate research and internship programs, including the Mellon Mays program.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And Duke University Press provides the funding for production and marketing. And we have a revenue sharing agreement with them. But in that vein, Duke University Press does do quite a bit of marketing for us as well. Just very briefly. I am Meridians fourth editor. Our first editor was Kum-Kum Bhamani at University of Santa Barbara.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: She was followed by Myriam Chancy, who's currently at Scripps. And our longest running editor to date was Paula J Giddings, who I'm assuming many of you know, was one of the founders of Black women's studies in the United States and led the journal for over a decade until her retirement in 2017 when I took over. I'm a scholar, a sociologist by training. I'm a scholar of Latin American, Latino studies, specifically Dominican, and Hispanic, Caribbean studies.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: We are advised by an editorial advisory board that is comprised of both Smith and Duke faculty members, who work in our core theme areas-- feminism, race, and transnationalism. And again, all this information is available on our websites. So I'm going to just move quickly through it. But each of our scholars does do transnational, feminist work focused on questions of race, racism, racialization, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: We also have a creative writing advisory board, because as I said, we published both research-based, scholarly, conventional work in some ways and creative writing work alongside one another. And our board is comprised of both Smith-based and Duke based creative writers, poets, et cetera, and literary scholars. As I said, our work ranges from more research-based traditional scholarship, to more innovative and experimental work, ranging from counterpoints which are engagements with theory and debates around semantics and vocabulary.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: The fields that our feminist contributors work within in the trenches, which are reports about activism, either from activists themselves or from scholars who work on those matters. Culture works which ranges from actual creative work to scholars writing about creative work. Memoirs and testimonials, self-explanatory, testifying to questions of race, sexuality, and nationhood, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Media matters in the archives features primary documents, largely from the 20th and 21st century that bring forward little known histories of feminist, anti-racist, transnational activism, and showcases the materials that are available here at the [INAUDIBLE] collection, which is one of the oldest women's history archives in the United States. Interviews and finally states of the field, which are essentially literature reviews rather than book reviews that cover contemporary publications around a specific team related to our subthemes.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Recently, I also put together a 20th Anniversary Reader. And this is related to my marketing and branding efforts because I wanted to showcase that Meridians has been around now for more than 22 years. And it has actually published what has become central pieces in the canons of women's studies, feminist studies, transnational studies, international relations, ethnic and racial studies, and area studies of various kinds-- from Palestinian, to Latin America, to African studies, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And this reader specifically meant to be adapted for classroom use, both undergraduate, and graduate, and as you will see, even in the high school context. And that was very much explicitly intended to market Meridians and to showcase the work that we have been doing for over 20 years now. We are also really grateful to Duke University Press, as I said, our partner in visualizing Meridians work and the work of our authors.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: This is a snapshot from their webpage for our journal. And you can see that they include features like most read, most cited, and latest, which is a phenomenal feature not only in terms of visiblizing Meridians, but central to our mission-- visiblizing the work of women of color, feminist knowledge, production. Whether that's women of color feminist knowledge producers themselves or about those women and their work. So this is very much part of that strategy.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: We have several forthcoming issues that are both curated in-house. Our next issue, which will be mailed out next week is on Black Feminism in the Caribbean and the US. And this was explicitly timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the global George Floyd inspired protests. The following issue inspired both by those protests but also the pandemic, Feminist Mournings, which has been guest edited by two prominent researchers in this field-- Jyoti Puri of Simmons and Kimberly Juanita Brown in Dartmouth.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: BIPOC Europe, also guest edited by two prominent scholars in that area of Black, Indigenous, people of color in Europe-- Nana Osei-Kofi and Shirley Anne Tate. And then finally, Global Indigenous Feminism, which would be forthcoming next year. Also guest edited with Basuli Deb and myself, in-house. Incorporating guest editors from across the United States and, increasingly, the world, is another strategy for visiblizing Meridians, and for marketing and branding what we do, and how we do it in collaboration, primarily, with women of color, feminist knowledge producers So just briefly, I've indicated some of the work that we do.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: I'll show you some slides moving forward. I've also instituted two article awards. One for the best article, a research based article in an existing volume. And one is an open call process for best creative writing in honor of Elizabeth Alexander. We have implemented an on-the-line multimedia complimentary content website feature. We have been doing virtual volume celebrations inspired by the pandemic in fall 2020, where we bring together all the contributors to a particular volume, so a conversation about their work, which has been a lovely way, again, of generating visibility, but also of creating conversations, not just between the pages of the journal but actually between the contributors.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: We've been collaborating on professional development exchanges with Feminist Africa, which is based in Ghana and is also a 20 year plus project. And with [INAUDIBLE] which is a feminist journal in the Dominican Republic, again, by way of globally visiblizing our work and our collaborative feminist knowledge production commitment. We have been used by the NWSA Feminist K through 12 Teacher Training program since 2016.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: NWSA folks like K Wise Whitehead, who is the current president of the National Women's Studies Association, has been using a special issue that she guest edited Meridians to do, K through 12 Feminist Teacher Training, on how to use gender analytics and feminist rubrics in K through 12 education. We have developed an extensive line of swag for authors, reviewers, et cetera. We present every year on Meridians project panel, not only at NWSA but also at other cognate conferences such as Latin American Studies, Study of Women and Gender, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And of course, we are currently participating in the creation of a federation of feminist journals and journal editors, which is an international group. So just quickly, this was the first Paula J Giddings Best Article Award. And again, this information was all on our website. We've been giving out the award for the past four years. The winners come from across the United States, from both tier one and lesser known colleges because again, the intent is to showcase scholarship by and about women of color feminist knowledge producers.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Elizabeth Alexander Award, this is our fourth year giving that award. The on-the-line feature, again, I invite you to go to the website-- multimedia compliments that range from videos, to primary documents that are clickable and available on the website, to audio, to snippets of film, et cetera. This is an image of the issue that was used for that K through 12 Education, which was the winner of the 2020 Exceptional Merit in Media Award, by the way.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: As you can see, it's a pedagogical resource for K through 12 teachers and scholars to teach feminisms in their classroom, again, bringing Meridians to younger audiences. We developed an extensive swag collection that is intended to keep Meridians literally on your desk and in your hands-- from mugs, to pens and pencils, to the slider cover on your camera, and your computer, sticky wallets for your iPhone, lanyard, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: With the idea, again, of reminding folks that Meridians is here. We've had an extensive social media presence from Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Bookshop, YouTube. And I invite everyone to follow us right now if you don't already, as well as to sign up for our newsletter, and to contact us, which is probably the most important thing.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: All right, thank you all. And I'm happy to answer any questions.
BETHANNE DORN: Thanks Ginetta, that was awesome. And thanks, Madison and Audrey as well. From there, we're going to jump into some questions that I've prepared, that I think you can each speak to from your differing perspectives-- from representing a publisher, a journal, a book publisher. And I think, we'll start out with-- all three of you talked about how your organizations are both mission-driven and values-- driven. What I want to know is two parts.
BETHANNE DORN: First, how did you first identify those core values that inspired everything? Then second, how do you express those values to different audiences and how?
MADISON CRYSTAL: Should I go first?
BETHANNE DORN: Madison, yeah. Jump on.
MADISON CRYSTAL: OK, so I'll say how we defined and established our values, a lot of that came from when PLOS was founded, about 20 years ago. So PLOS was founded as part of this movement, and one of the really early actors in advocating for open access publishing, the idea that anyone should have access to the research that is being conducted, a lot of it being funded by taxpayers, that shouldn't be behind a paywall for readers.
MADISON CRYSTAL: Everyone should be able to use and read those pieces. So a lot of our values are based on that, the increasing accessibility of research communication, increasing the transparency of it. And so as we've evolved and gotten-- the marketplace has evolved. Open access has become much more of a bigger thing than it was when we started. So the values that we set for ourselves are really asking ourselves, what do we need to embody in order to achieve our mission to continue transforming scientific communication and the way it's communicated, in ways that are more trustworthy, reliable, accessible, and fair for everyone else.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So within that, we know we need to earn the trust of our researchers first. And we need to demonstrate the transparency that we're asking them to practice. We need to demonstrate that as an organization. So we make a lot of our decisions transparent. A lot of our financials even are transparent. We've participated in the Plan S Price Transparency Framework, helping to further those goals, as well as committing to very transparent goals around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So those are how we've defined our goals. At the individual, I think journal level, as I was saying before, like those need to be complementary. So each of our journals will take those core values. And they will never change. All of our journals need to support transparency, diversity, inclusion, building trust. And they do that in a way that is specific to those communities.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So for example, if we see at a journal like Global Public Health is a journal we launched last year. And that had a very specific mission to include more diverse voices, to bring the conversation around public health and global public health, more specifically, really back to an actual global audience and global experts. So we needed to really make sure that journal was a representative of the authors and researchers that we hoped would read it.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So we intentionally looked for a very diverse editorial board. And we also needed to make it possible for those researchers to publish with us. So that meant coming up with a new business model that was more regionally equitable, and had the ability to partner with institutions, and make publication costs for authors free, in some cases, and to make the institutional partnership model itself regionally equitable, so that we were charging a lower cost for lower income regions.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So yeah.
BETHANNE DORN: That's a lot. And what I think is amazing is not just about how you're expressing your core values, but also how you're living the out, and like you mentioned, spinning off new business models. Your brand strategy is actually a reflection of the whole business strategy itself. And I think the closer those two are aligned like you mentioned in your introduction, the better everything flows.
BETHANNE DORN: It's much more easy to speak to that when everyone is on the same page. This is why we do what we do. This is how we speak to it.
MADISON CRYSTAL: Yeah, absolutely. I think authenticity is really important and very-- the audience that we have these days is very sensitive to that. So you can't just say something while you're doing something else. Your audience is going to know, hey, you're not living your values.
BETHANNE DORN: Yeah, I want to check with Audrey and Ginetta as well. But before we do, Madison I'm curious, do you, as new people are onboarded or as perhaps new brands are spun up in PLOS, do you do internal training around the history of the brand?
MADISON CRYSTAL: Yeah, so we do a little bit. There is an onboarding process for new staff, and as well as, I think, every time we work on a new brand, a new journal, a new product that we're offering. Part of my job is to bring that history into it. So I'm this repository for information about PLOS. That helps that I've been there six years. And work with-- actually, the people that I work with on my team, a lot of them have been with PLOS for 10 years.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So it's like, oh yes, we can all point to things that have happened a few years ago. How is that representative of us now? But it is important to have new staff understand where we've been, why we're in the specific moment now, and why we care about the things that we do care about. So PLOS, we have a lot of different departments, a lot of different work that we're working on. So what I like to do is bring that together into this story for PLOS, which is no matter what you're working on, you're working towards making research more open, effective, and fair.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So everything that we do feeds into that. But yeah, absolutely, it is important to keep that history and goals in mind so that everything is connected.
BETHANNE DORN: Yeah, that's essential. Speaking of history, so Audrey 1517 has been around for a long time. And Fortress is not a new publishing group. How do you define your core values there and how do you express those to diverse audiences?
AUDREY CLARK: Yeah, I think Fortress defined their core values based on the larger organizations, thoughts around that in terms of relevance and wanting to meet people where they are, no matter where they are, and no matter what point in their lives that they're at. And I see that happening when we segment into our three audiences because fortress serves the ministry, audience, the academic audience, as well as the higher academia with textbooks and the like.
AUDREY CLARK: So I'll use ministry as an example. I think we create content based on what we know our audience will need and what they value. And it's all feeds back into itself. We have our values, but we want to stay in touch with what the audience is valuing and what they're talking about so that we can continue to create relevant content. And to that end, we actually have a series called Working Creature, that is a specific collection that preachers can go to, so we're a resource for them.
AUDREY CLARK: So that they can go to if they want to know how to talk about the headlines, when something terrible is happening, or if they want to know how to talk about Christian nationalism. They can even pull from outside of our working preacher line and grab a book about that. So I think it's really staying in touch with your audience and it's not always talking to them.
AUDREY CLARK: And then what was the other part of your question, sorry?
BETHANNE DORN: I think that's great, like understanding both your values and then the values of your audiences. And seeing how those two intermingle. And content creation is no small matter, being able to understand what they want, and being able to express it across lots of different channels, whether that's social media, or like you said, new books, blogs, et cetera. Ginetta, I'm curious, so Meridians is completely mission driven from what you publish, to who you hire.
BETHANNE DORN: How did that get started? How do you define your core values? Has it evolved over time? How do you make space for that?
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Yeah, thank you. Well, as I quickly glossed over, we started here at Smith College by what used to be called Women's Studies Faculty, now it's Study of Women and Gender, who realized early on that intersectionality was not being well represented in the existing women's studies journals. And those existing journals were only 10, 15 years old because women's studies as only been around since the late '60s, early '70s.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And we're talking about, basically, a mid-1990s moment when these four faculty-- one of whom was actually Elizabeth Alexander, which is why the award was named in her honor. She was here at Smith for a period of time and helped establish the Poetry Center. The others were Susan Van Dyne, who was a nationally, at the time, recognized consultant to other colleges in establishing women's studies programs.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Nancy supported [INAUDIBLE] who was a scholar of feminism in Latin America. And then [INAUDIBLE] Ferguson who was a scholar of African-American gender studies And they were four colleagues here, who helped establish women's studies, and were promoting women's studies and really feminist work, but realized that, as I said, that women of color, feminist knowledge production was not getting its due in the existing journals.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So that was a problem. Secondly, related to that, that existing feminist and women's studies journals, in a way necessarily, because of the nature of the academy at the time and having to establish the intellectual validity of women's studies, they hewed very closely to conventional research-based scholarship. And didn't really allow room for other more creative feminist forms of knowledge production, such as creative writing, visual art, performing arts, et cetera, which have been central to women of color feminist knowledge production projects and practices historically, precisely because of exclusionary politics.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So they felt that this journal would have to do those things, center women of color feminist knowledge producers, center the mutual constitutedness of rigorous, intellectual, conventional work and creative work in feminist knowledge production, coming from a women of color location. And then thirdly, transnationalism, understanding that women of color in the US is necessarily a transnational global internationalist, at the time, we could have even said third-worldist orientation that recognizes geopolitics as part and parcel of these projects, that moves beyond a US centric provincial orientation and frame to understanding feminism, race, and transnationalism.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So they approached the president at the time, who was the first Black president at Smith College, Ruth Simmons, who was a visionary in many, many ways. And who immediately supported the project and secured what was at the time preliminary grant-based funding and then continued to fund it through her offices. So it really has always been a very mission driven project. It was born that way. It's come of age that way.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And it's maturing that way. And I think in fact, even expanding its reach. And that's the hope. That's the goal that I've been striving for anyway. So thank you for the question.
BETHANNE DORN: Yeah, of course. I'm also curious-- so we've talked about how we have defined values for each of our respective organizations, are there moments where as the champions of the brand or the keepers of the brand, that you've noticed that you're out of alignment with your organization's mission, and values, and how it's being expressed, and how there needs to be an update?
BETHANNE DORN:
MADISON CRYSTAL: I can take a stab at that one. I think we haven't really noticed anything that seriously out of alignment at PLOS. Although I would say there is more of a risk of having different pieces of our publishing operation be out of sync. So for example, a lot of the marketing and communications that we do, it's very important to manage the tone of voice that we're using, the words that we're using to make sure that we're representing PLOS consistently.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And when you have teams where you have several different writers, working on different campaigns without necessarily everybody seeing what each other is doing, you can sometimes have-- you're sending out one email campaign that's about probably to maybe researchers who have never practiced open science before. And what you're saying there is more encouraging, more trust building, trying to get them to see why these practices are good.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And speaking to the needs that they have. Sometimes real fears about how is my work going to be co-opted if I practice open science? Like is this really reliable? And then you have maybe other campaigns where we're talking to researchers who have been practicing open science for a long time. And they want to see us go further. They say, yeah.
MADISON CRYSTAL: All research should do this. Everyone should do this. So what I think we've seen is when those two conflict, when those audiences overlap. You've got the one end where you have some researchers thinking, well, why are you talking about all these fears? Those aren't real. Those aren't-- and we're like, well, yeah. But actually a lot of researchers have them.
MADISON CRYSTAL: So I think there a piece of it that's just making sure everything is in step in that-- you have to talk to different audiences, different ways, but you also have to keep those streams in alignment so that when someone has-- someone sees the different streams, because they're going to, I mean it's going to overlap. It all makes sense in the end. So I think that's one of the more difficult pieces to manage.
MADISON CRYSTAL:
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: On this, Audrey is ready to jump in. I'll just add that, I think the biggest challenge for us is that we have a commitment to transnationalism. But the fact is that we're US-based. And we are a for-profit publication. Our partner Duke University Press has-- we have to generate revenue. And that does conflict with the core ethic of access in terms of transnationalism.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So one of the ways that Duke has been an excellent partner in navigating those conflicts is through, and I forgot to mention, it but through their developing countries initiative, where they allow us to select an issue, each volume, that will be, not open access, but free access for a period of time, anywhere from three months to six months. So for example, Our feminist African cartography issue was free access for over three months.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And was downloaded many thousands of times. I think it's something like 2,500 times from the continent, from Africa because we can track who's been downloading it where. Which is exactly as it should be because the contributors to that issue, many of them were based in Africa. But some were African diasporic scholars in the United States writing about their African countries of expertise. So folks in those countries should be able to read what is being said about their locations, their histories, et cetera, their politics.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So that free access was a way of navigating the tension between the need to generate revenue as a for-profit venture and really living our mission, which is transnational feminist knowledge production and collaboration. Similarly, publishing in languages other than English, and other than European languages, to include global languages such as Mapuche, or character based languages-- Arabic, or Chinese, et cetera.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And having that be part of the journal. Related to that, having reviewers who are located outside the US reviewing work about their locations, to, again, make sure that this is truly a transnational project not just US-based, while also managing, and this is a key thing, and I'll hand it over to Audrey. The fact that we are very sensitive to sustaining the gold standard of double-blind peer review, because one of our missions is to grow the pipeline of feminist women of color scholars, who get tenure, and who are tenurable, and get promotion.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: And that requires that we align with the conventional academic norms of rigorous double-blind peer review. So how do we do that when very often conventional means, white serving, androcentric, eurocentric, US-centric? We do that by making sure that our peer reviewers are actually experts in what our scholars are writing about. And that often means other women of color feminist knowledge producers but in the US and outside.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: So I think those are some of the ways that we try to manage the tensions between the pragmatic context that we're in and our values and mission. Audrey, I hand it over to you.
AUDREY CLARK: I think something that, actually, had a conference last week, someone mentioned is our goal is accessibility. And that doesn't just mean making it digestible for general readers, it also means actually making it accessible like audio books, or books in Braille, or things like that. So that is something-- that is feedback we have gotten that is contrary to our brand alignment. But we take that feedback and we're incorporating it.
AUDREY CLARK: Like we are starting to ramp-up doing more audiobooks. And we're looking at how we can do it more economically for us because even though we are a non-profit, we do still have to hit certain numbers. So it's something that we're constantly working towards, in terms of how we can better align ourselves with accessibility.
BETHANNE DORN: Yeah, I love that. You both touched on, Ginetta and Audrey, that the realities of living within a context, having to meet numbers, having to-- the business case behind why your brand exists, even if in a non-profit environment and reaching your audience in new ways. And having them all align on your mission. And I think that's so important to pull out because you have different stakeholders.
BETHANNE DORN: You have different groups that you have to speak to. And your brand has to be able to encompass all of it. And it's great to see that you're thinking about that proactively. We have a lot of great questions that have been submitted in the Q&A section. And we have a little bit of time left. So I want to jump to those. We may not be able to answer all of them, but I'm going to do my best to get as many asked.
BETHANNE DORN: And we'll go from there. So one that I think that all three of us can speak to, or all three of you can speak to, [INAUDIBLE] has anyone been through a rebrand? And how was it decided that there needs to be a change? And more importantly, who led that change? As anyone experienced that? GINETTA E.B.
CANDELARIO: We have not.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I can speak to this a little bit. So PLOS has, I will say, reinvigorated our brand a couple of times. A full rebrand, I think, is a drastic measure that you probably don't want to take as a publisher unless you have some very serious concerns within your audience. So a full rebrand is redefining yourself, potentially changing names, and logos, and really who you are. But PLOS reinvigorated our brand, I think, just to keep pace with, I mean any modern design styles.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I think if you Google PLOS, you can see iterations of our logo. And we still have this internal Slack channel. We're like, oh, they're using the small o, which is 10 years out of date. And so I think part of it is just keeping pace with modern design, the way that people talk, the way that organizations interact with their audience. We did a-- our most recent re-invigoration of our brand was a few years ago, I think 2019, where we wanted to-- we changed our logo to incorporate more colors, more vibrancy.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And a lot of that is just to show that we are a vibrant organization. We want to show the excitement behind the science and the different ways that we're working to transform science communication. And we also, within that, we looked at our messaging and the voice that we use. And we decided well this really needs to be more personable and approachable because we are not-- we don't want to be the kind of publisher that tells everyone what to do.
MADISON CRYSTAL: We don't want to be this authority figure. We want to be welcoming and open to our audiences. So that was an element that we also changed, and also really just thinking about our marketing and brand strategy. How do we personify ourselves as that partner for researchers, more so than an authority figure. So that led to other events that we've led. So one of them was this summit on open science, where we invited different speakers and researchers to attend and talk through different issues within open science.
MADISON CRYSTAL: But it was really a community-led event with community speakers. And we've tried more to raise those voices of researchers, and people, experts within the space through our channels so that we are-- we're really this conduit for researchers. And we have our mission. We want to partner with us to change. And so for who led that, I would say that came from multiple different directions.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I think our CMO was the main driver there. But also the entire marketing and communications team really worked together to figure out, what do we want ourselves to look like? What values do we want to personify? How do we do that? So yeah, hope that answers some of that question.
AUDREY CLARK: I myself have never been through a complete rebrand. But I think if you're going to decide-- how you decide there needs to be a change is through a brand audit and just constantly talking to your audience. But as far as who leads the change, I really think everyone, like upper leadership. Your upper leadership team needs to all be on the same page because if you don't have buy-in from your upper leadership, it's going to be really challenging to make that change to your brand and have it go through every communication that you put out from product development to your marketing team.
AUDREY CLARK:
BETHANNE DORN: Do you have a regular brand audit calendar or rhythm that you go through?
AUDREY CLARK: Not yet, that is something that I'm working on. But I do make a point to engage with people on social media, our customers on social media, and especially at conferences. I went to a library conference last week. And I'm going to LA this week. And I'm going to make a point to sort of talk to librarians and see what their needs are. And that's how I found out that librarians want to be able to get audio books for all of their students and professors on campus
BETHANNE DORN: So it sounds like it's a balance between listening to your audience, and making sure your existing brand is meeting that, as well as reviewing what's out there, and making sure that your brand is consistent and speaking to your audience. So to Madison's point earlier, that the voice and tone is consistent across different publishing groups or journals. And then, logo changes, visual updates, making sure that's consistent as well.
BETHANNE DORN: All of that folds into having a cohesive brand experience. That's great. We have a number of other questions that I want to get to as well. It looks like we have a couple answered. Madison, one directed towards you. You talked a little bit about brand health for publisher and journals. Under PLOS, is there a North Star metric of brand health for the journal, or would that be the publisher?
BETHANNE DORN: And how do you impact that metric [INAUDIBLE]??
MADISON CRYSTAL: Yeah, so I will say a lot of brands consider a net promoter score to be a North Star. I think simply because it's easy to get that net promoter. Score I like a more robust set of metrics. I think that's-- I mean, that score will tell you how likely your audiences are to recommend you or talk badly about you, which is a good measure of brand health. But it doesn't tell you why. And it doesn't tell you what elements of your brand are doing really well.
MADISON CRYSTAL: It doesn't tell you whether your audience likes you, but maybe sees you completely differently than how you think you're being seen. So I think Audrey has touched on this a lot as well. A lot of it is about engaging with the community. So we have a number of different ways that we do that. We have our editorial boards for our journals, for example, our all academic researchers who are actively working in the space.
MADISON CRYSTAL: And we have staff who meet with them regularly to understand what they want to see from the journal, what they're hearing from their communities, to make those changes at our journals happen. We also have more standardized marketing tools that we use to do this. We do a lot of social listening using different tools on social media to track conversations that are happening around our brand.
MADISON CRYSTAL: I have set up this yearly survey to do this brand audit that Audrey mentioned, asking targeted questions about different elements of our brand, and measuring over time how that changes. And we started that with really this open ended survey that asks researchers to tell us what they thought of us because we wanted to know if there was something in there that we hadn't thought of. So if everyone is saying, oh, I really like this piece of your brand.
MADISON CRYSTAL: We're like, oh, OK. That's a small thing, but maybe we should make it bigger. So that survey, measuring changes over time. And specifically finding ways to ask your audience about the values that you think you're representing I think are important to complement that just one numerical score that you can give yourself. GINETTA E.B.
CANDELARIO: So we've
CANDELARIO: issued surveys to both our reviewers and our contributors through our editorial management submission system, essentially asking them these questions about the process, the journal, et cetera, et cetera, to collect their feedback. And just keep it in mind, as we move forward. But if we were going to go through a rebranding, it would have to be really editorial advisory board driven. And I think it would require a pretty expensive conversation.
CANDELARIO:
BETHANNE DORN: Yeah, I think that's such a smart thing to point out that. There needs to be a marriage between both quantitative and qualitative data. So your NPS score can tell you some, but you need that qualitative data, hearing directly from folks to fill in the details, know the full story. And then Ginetta, like you said, reaching out directly. Consistently having surveys. Consistently listening I think is the best way to know how your brand is landing.
BETHANNE DORN: And what, if anything, needs to be updated. I want to end on a little fun question. I think like one. Ginetta, you've already done a great job of answering this already. So thank you. Folks can look in the answered section of the Q&A portion of Zoom as well. What kind of swag do reviewers, or does anybody enjoy, what they find interesting, and what you feel like is the best thing to use?
BETHANNE DORN: So Ginetta, I'll have you start. And the other two can jump in as well.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Yeah, I say all of it, actually. And this is actually also a great program, project for our interns. Our student interns have just been phenomenal at preparing our swag because they know what they would pick up. So everything from our mugs. We have several different kinds, which always includes one of our quotes from Ruth. Pens and pencils.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Our color purple. I didn't say it. But purple is our official unofficial color for Meridians. And so I had it consistently on pretty much everything that we do. The My new favorite one is my camera slider, which is also purple, which literally keeps us front and center.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: Just thinking in terms of the psychology, that I literally want us to be in hand at every-- and visible like every possible moment. So that when you get, for example, the invitation to review, you say, oh, yeah. I want to do this for Meridians. Or as the author, or our board members, even when I invited people onto our board, or alarms for development purposes, as I said, we're in a capital campaign.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: I send out swag boxes with our 20th Anniversary Reader and these Meridians branded goodies. And they have all just been really positively received. The students tend to like things like the sticky wallets for their phone, which again, is great because your phones are perennially with you. So Meridians is also then just circulating through campus and through the world quite a bit. So nothing has bombed yet.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO:
MADISON CRYSTAL: I will say, for PLOS, we've gotten some weird requests for swag. Our t-shirts have always been amazing. We have an amazing graphic designer who has worked with PLOS for 10 years. And she's been in charge of our visual brand. So we have this like collectible PLOS t-shirts. People are looking for the ones that are out of print that we used to use.
MADISON CRYSTAL: But we also get requests, I think one of the fun ones for me is we have a journal called PLOS ONE. So some of our editors, when they're having a new child have requested, hey, is there a PLOS onesie? So apparently, that's in desire. But I think the t-shirts for us are the big one because it is something that can be vibrant, and fun, and hopefully something that people use for a long time.
MADISON CRYSTAL: We don't like to do too much of the other stuff that we're worried people put in their conference bag and then never use again. But I think the t-shirts are a fun one when we have the opportunity to do that
AUDREY CLARK: And for me, Fortress mostly does pens right now. But I've seen, at my previous publisher, Berman and Littlefield, we did crab mallets for ALA, because it happens in DC. And they're are DC publishers. The crab mallets and mambo sauce as our chatzky. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it was great. They flew off the shelves.
AUDREY CLARK: And we've also done sunglasses before. And people seem to love those, especially, in Maryland summer. And then, I don't think we're actually going to keep making these. But our editorial director made a Fortress branded bookmark in his woodshop, in his woodworking shop. So a premium bookmark goes a long way too.
GINETTA E.B. CANDELARIO: That's great.
BETHANNE DORN: I love these ideas. Keeping things front and center. Keeping things usable, but also something that's really unique, that speaks to what it is you do like a bookmark. Thanks everyone so much for your answers. Thanks so much everyone that attended in for questions. We're right on time. I'm going to hand it back Jason to wrap us up.
JASON POINTE: All right, thank you everybody for attending today's webinar. And thank you also to the panelists for an engaging discussion. And of course, thanks to our 2022 education sponsors-- ARPHA, J&J Editorial, OpenAthens, SILVERCHAIR, 67 Bricks, and Taylor&Francis F1000. You will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback to help us pick topics for future events.
JASON POINTE: And please, check the SSP website for information on upcoming events such as those shown here, including the SSP Training Series, virtual innovation showcase, and Ask the Experts panel on Ethics and Publishing. Today's discussion was recorded. And all registrants will receive a link to the recording when it's posted on the SS website. This concludes our session today. GINETTA E.B.
CANDELARIO: Thank you.
CANDELARIO: Thank you all.
AUDREY CLARK: Thanks, everyone.
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