Marketing in Malta

Anyone that is lucky enough to get up early enough on a Sunday morning in time to purchase the newspapers will  find snuggled inside The Malta Independent a copy of the wonderful Magazine ‘Taste‘ published by Proximus Publishing and Edited by Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Unlike most cookbooks I tend to flick through while hiding in my local supermarket Taste concentrates on making its recipes relevant to ingredients you can find in Malta placing emphasis on what’s in season (thank you…sigh).  This magazine really gets the mix between advertising, articles and aesthetics right making it a pleasure not only to read but to collect and reference on those rare occasions when I manage to get the weekly shopping in.

The associated website launched in July 2008 aims to be a companion to the publication, leaving out the advertising and delivering the content.

The reasons this website delivers:

1. Its updated frequently from staff members, contributors and the public.
2. The style is consistent with the publication.
3. It reinforces the brand when bookmaking the site with a favicon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon).
4. It allows me to subscribe via RSS.
5. It lists information categorized by edition.
6. It allows users to post questions in response to articles featured.
7. The ‘looking for ingredients’ section allows people to build on the community aspect of the website, in future this could lead to targeted advertising.
8. The site is produced using mostly good clean code.

Room for improvement (mostly usability)

1. A year on and as the website grows its easy to see how a user can become lost in the  navigation.
2. No connections with other social media avenues, Facebook or Twitter limiting the chances of visitors
3. As this site grows so will the amount of scrolling needed per page, I counted over 70 contributors and although listed in alphabetical order I had to scroll down the page
4. Heavy dependency on the browsers back button
5. Quite a few accessibility issues need addressing to gain a few points

As a business model you can see the huge potential this website has to offer, over time, and with the right direction, I can see this being a site that develops mostly from user generated content especially if the publication is geared towards driving people to interact online, something that users are already asking the editor about. The website offers some nice features and knowing what an iPhone junkie I am it won’t be long till I start reading off the recipes on my trips to Pavi on a Friday evening.

So as you can see what Taste is doing is building its community, a hungry community, as one user put it ‘becoming a taste- aholic’. I’ll take pleasure in watching this one grow.