Penguin-branded consumer site to launch in the UK

20 March 2015 Books+Publishing

In the UK, Penguin Random House (PRH) will launch a ‘multi-million pound’ Penguin-branded consumer website in the second half of this year, reports the Bookseller. Speaking at the Changing Media Summit in London, CEO Tom Weldon said the company was ‘very lucky to have the one true powerful consumer-facing brand in Penguin in the UK’, and that it would deliver its consumer-directed content from Penguin-branded accounts and its corporate announcements from PRH. Weldon said the website would ‘cater to the needs of readers’ and not be used just to market books. ‘What consumers tell us is that they don’t want to come to a website such as this either to discover books or to buy them, what they want to use the website for is to forge a bigger bond with authors. We see what we are doing as forming the bridge between these two.’ Weldon said there were no plans to include more ‘general transactional elements, except in niche areas’. ‘We really aren’t going to be competing with Amazon. To be a retailer requires hundreds of millions of pounds in investment in technology, and a massive budget in customer acquisitions,’ said Weldon.

Category: International news