Communicate

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In a civilized society, there is an order to things. First, you erect tall buildings, design ingenious cars, create lucrative businesses… and then you find a comfortable, old armchair and settle down to read some books.

The book trade is growing in Dubai as more bookshops open with each passing day. Borders, which opened its first location in the Mall of the Emirates in 2006, now has four bookstores in the region, with four more due to open in the near future. BooksPlus will soon be opening another branch in the Arabian Plaza mall in the Mirdiff area of Dubai. Magrudy’s opened the largest bookstore in the UAE at Dubai Festival City last March, as well as a branch at The Dubai Mall.

Out-of-towners like Borders and Virgin are moving in on regional brands such as Magrudy’s, BooksPlus and Jashanmal. But the local mainstays say there is more to being a bookseller than just selling books. Although international franchises have been successful, the granddaddies of the regional book trade say it is more important to be part of the community.
“[We] are the only brand which can be called the neighborhood store,” says Melroy Dickson, general manager of BooksPlus. Whereas Magrudy’s has set up shop in high-profile locations, BooksPlus chooses to widen its customer base by tapping into more low-key suburban areas such as the Greens and Town Centre Jumeirah.

“The strategy has been to spread it out into communities and different parts so that [we have] the reach. We probably have one of the best reaches in terms of distribution in Dubai,” says Dickson.

Isobel Abulhoul, co-founder and managing director of Magrudy’s, agrees that booksellers can benefit from being committed to customer care and the community. “My focus is always on customers. They are really the lifeblood for me,” she says. Magrudy’s has always been a company built on customer demand, says Abulhoul. From its beginnings as an educational toy store that also stocked books, it has catered to the suggestions of shoppers. She says these requests are what drive the brand’s direction and growth.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST. At first, mothers came in and bought toys and books for their children. Then customers began asking for mother and baby books. Then, says Abulhoul, “women being women, [they asked for] cookbooks.” Travel books, bestsellers and mainstream fiction weren’t far behind. “It was almost as if I would go home at night and come back the next morning and the books would multiply in my absence,” she says.

Magrudy’s also has projects geared toward benefiting the community, such as the Magrudy’s Educational Resource Centre (MERC) and the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature (EAIFL).

Both of these projects have a focus on education. MERC, which opened in 2002, organizes professional development courses run by visiting lecturers and allows teachers to evaluate texts before ordering them. EAIFL, which is due to take place this month, has its final day set aside as “Education Day,” when the authors invited to the festival will visit various schools, universities and colleges around Dubai and talk to students. The list of visiting writers includes British novelist Louis De Bernières, Margaret Atwood from Canada, Iraqi-born poet and novelist Fadhil Al-Azzawi, and other high-profile regional and international authors. “My heart is in the importance of education and how important it is that our children are literate,” says Abulhoul.

PRICE PER PAGE. BooksPlus makes its contribution to society more bluntly, aiming for the wallet before the brain. Average book prices are cheaper than those of larger retailers (like Magrudy’s), says Dickson. “Our price points tend to be much lower than the other booksellers. There are a lot of titles where the average price point would be around 42-45 [dirhams]; ours is around 25-30 [dirhams].”

As a result, BooksPlus has a more low-key approach to community outreach, concentrating on readings, events and book signings. Each branch organizes book clubs, which reach out to suburban communities. They also host book launches and other events, recently promoting the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, and Robin Sharma’s leadership and personality development books.

Advertising is largely barter-led for BooksPlus. It has alliances with magazines (including this one) and through publishing houses such as Motivate to run long-term strategic ads promoting the BooksPlus brand directly.
 
Dickson says that spreading advertising across different magazines allows them to appeal to different types of readers. “When you are a bookstore, you are consciously targeting different customers; [the advertising strategy is based] on a customer basis,” he says. “You’ve got books for women, books for men, books for children, books for hobbyists.”
 
BooksPlus also runs short-term tactical advertising in newspapers and through flyers, and other below-the-line advertising to publicize events, in-store sales and book launches.  
 
Magrudy’s adopts a similar approach, working on a small advertising budget and forming alliances with newspapers and magazines, Mia Santiago, marketing manager of Magrudy’s, tells Communicate.
 
Santiago says she prefers print advertising to television. Although TV ads appeal to a wider market, they are too short for her taste. “We do not find it effective as it does not remain there,” says Santiago. “[The television ad] will only be there for a couple of seconds unlike newspapers and magazines where, as long as the reader has the copy, they can go back to it again.”
 
To this end, Magrudy’s has used Dubai-based indie agency The Tribe to put together some long-copy ads that took almost as long as a newspaper article to read when they ran in the international edition of The Times in April (see “The story sellers,” page 69, Communicate, July-August 2008).
 
Unlike BooksPlus, Magrudy’s eschews strategic advertising. Instead it chooses mostly to promote launches, events and new products. The company advertises on radio, appealing to music lovers and listeners of programs such as Magrudy’s own two-hour book discussion show.

STOCKING TRADE. Santiago says that seasonal advertising is a tactic through which Magrudy’s can appeal directly to separate book-buying demographics through gift recommendations. “At Christmas, we usually advertise gifts for him, gifts for her, gifts for boys and gifts for girls,” she says.
 
Although Magrudy’s advertises in a wider range of mediums than BooksPlus, running both print and radio ads, Abulhoul insists that she knows little about branding. “It’s not been something that I’ve ever even thought about,” she says.
 
“I have come to be a bookseller from very unusual roots, and I think that is one of my strengths,” continues Abulhoul. “I’m not a business person really, and sometimes that allows you to do things that other business people don’t see. I don’t have those boundaries.”
 
Abulhoul denies that Magrudy’s has upped its ad and marketing spend to compete with new booksellers entering the market. She says, however, that it is not sitting on its haunches and, like any good business, is always evolving.
 
“Any business is like a plant,” says Abulhoul. “It’s a living thing and it changes every single day.” But she maintains booksellers should concentrate on improving their own strengths rather than focusing too much on their competitors. “If you change your strategy because someone comes into the market, then there is something seriously wrong with the strategy,” she says.
 

So although more bookstores are taking root in Dubai, Magrudy’s and BooksPlus, hoping to grow organically from their established roots, are not planning to turn over a new leaf.

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