Feeling right at home: Good Housekeeping UK’s new MD, Liz Moseley, on how she is boosting the iconic brand
When Liz Moseley took up the role as new Managing Director of Good Housekeeping UK and the Good Housekeeping Institute late last year, she faced a huge challenge. Not because the brand was doing badly, but because GH was, and still is, doing so well.
“When you come in with a change brief on a business that is tanking, it’s fine because you can adopt desperate measures. But if it’s a thriving business with diversified revenues and customers that love you, it’s a bit different,” says Moseley, who arrived at GH having worked at some of the biggest media brands in the UK, including The Times and Elle.
To find the best way forward, the new MD took a long hard look at Good Housekeeping UK’s greatest asset – its loyal customers. After putting out an invite on Instagram for GH ‘superfans’ to travel to London and connect with the brand, Moseley spent two days chatting to women to discuss their lives and what they are into.
“You would never have more fun than spending a morning with a bunch of GH readers,” she smiles, recalling the experience. “They’re just fantastic. The things they find interesting, the things that they laugh at, their life experience is all over the place and if we can channel that kind of richness into a brand, it explodes and gives back ten-fold the other side.”
To cater to her audience, Moseley knew she had to find a way of balancing “legacy and deep expertise with innovation”. Key to hitting that sweet spot has been communication, both with her seasoned editorial team and the experts at the remarkable Good Housekeeping Institute – the huge consumer test house in London, which celebrates its 100th birthday in 2024 and where almost 4,000 products were tested and reviewed last year.
“There are people who’ve worked on Good Housekeeping UK for a long time. They’re not normal journalists, they’re real subject matter experts. That’s where the trust in the brand comes from,” she says. “So, 50% of my job is listening to them, learning from them, trying to work out how we’ve got to where we are – and then innovate.
“Good Housekeeping UK has always been an innovative place and the environment that you get at the GHI helps with that thinking, because you’re getting new products the whole time, you’re thinking about customer trends and things like that. And, we want and need to move quickly, because we do have really big ambitions for what Good Housekeeping UK could be.”
A winning recipe
Moseley is certainly not wasting any time, the new MD turning up the heat on several revenue streams that are bubbling along nicely at Good Housekeeping UK. Using the GHI’s 100th anniversary as a catalyst, the brand, which is part of the Hearst group, is in for one bumper year.
Having launched a new mobile app in February, the GH Live event is being supersized in 2024; there are plans for new video content; a recipe app is coming in the autumn; while a new VIP Club and destination newsletter have also been announced.
Alongside organising bespoke open days at the Institute so people can get a flavour of the work experts do, the GHI is launching a string of awards this year focusing on food, sleep, parenting and beauty.
Moseley is also looking to boost ecommerce and accreditation – with the latter already in huge demand among manufacturers craving GHI’s influential ‘Tried & Tested’ seal of approval.
“All the different strands of the business are important and have growth potential,” she says. “For instance, we have an e-commerce business that is better than nascent but far from optimised. There is a lot of untapped potential.
“The same goes with accreditation. Growing accreditation is harder yards because you have to bet big. So, launching a parenting vertical, we have to build the expertise in parenting which we don’t have. We have to create all the protocols from scratch. We have to build relationships with parenting product suppliers that we don’t know from Adam. We have to carve out testing capacity to do parenting testing. We have to find women with babies to help. It’s a hard bet to place. But we think it’s one worth placing.”
Print powers ahead
Another safe bet for Moseley is print. Good Housekeeping UK Magazine is the country’s top selling women’s lifestyle publication and has an average issue readership of 1.15 million, to go with a total digital audience of 4.45 million. And things looks set to get even better for the monthly magazine.
“We’ve had a really strong start to the year in print advertising and have a thriving UK newsstand print sale,” says Moseley.
“Print is super important and a massive chunk of our business. We’ve had very positive growth in direct print subscriptions. We at Hearst do not accept that print is over. We’ve seen the benefit of investing in it over this past year. Investing in copy, investing in your retailer relationships, getting your point of sale right – old school things that people used to do.
“You can roll over and accept print’s going to go, or you can say, actually, there are customers that want this product in this format. So why would we not go out of our way to give it to them?
“I am really interested in new distribution models for print products. It is right to say that the way the news and magazines category has operated at retail, that’s going to change because newspapers are probably on a decline. But just because you can’t buy it at WH Smith doesn’t mean you can’t buy it at all. Where else should they be available? Look what happened with books. We all thought that was over when the Kindle came, but it turns out they’ve had the best sales for the last two years. So, we really believe in print at Hearst.”
Appealing to all ages
With a huge, loyal readership in place, the steps Moseley is taking are more about expanding the access and enjoyment for the current GH customers, rather than trying to win over those who don’t know the brand.
“The broadest Good Housekeeping UK reach is plenty big enough. So, we need to create products for women who are already Good Housekeeping UK users in some way, shape or form,” Moseley points out. “It’s not changing the brand in order to serve a new customer set. What the brand is and what it represents is bang on. We have just left some stuff on the table.
“We haven’t really created enough ways for women who want to consume content digitally. We haven’t given them ways to pay for it. Obviously, every platform is quite specific and nuanced, and your tone of voice might need to adjust a little bit. But it’s certainly not a brief where I’ve come in and said, for instance, I’m going to make it younger. When you discover you’ve got this amazingly diverse intergenerational audience already, you just have to go and meet them where they are.”
The fact that the GHI turns 100 this year gives the brand the opportunity to look at how women’s lives have changed over the last century.
“Because Good Housekeeping UK has this intergenerational audience, the sense of time passing, what that means, and what the future looks like, it’s in our wheelhouse to look at a birthday of this nature and talk about how women’s lives have changed,” Moseley points out.
“What does it feel like to be a woman perhaps in your early 30s? Maybe you’re having a baby for the first time? How is that different from how your mum felt when she was in your life stage? Those sorts of things are in our lifeblood to look at and analyse and crucially, to throw forward.
“What is striking when you talk to Good Housekeeping UK readers at any age is that they’re all super ambitious for their future. They are super ambitious for themselves, for their families, for the future and for the world.”
