Night Of Long Knives

Night of the long knives on London Road

SADNESS and recrimination across the radio phone-ins this week as  TJ Hughes becomes the latest retail institution to go under on the high street.

HMV, Jane Norman, Thorntons, Habitat closer to home Homeform Group in Manchester; over the last five days all have announced they're brining in the administrators or closing stores. The weakest links had better watch it, but will we end up with the high street we deserve?

For those motivated by nostalgia, TJ Hughes truly is a grand dame of the Liverpool high street. She (why is she a she, like a ship?) must have heralded a brave new world in 1912 when she opened, the same year as the Titanic set sail.

Excellent service, a whole range of products under one roof from homeware to the latest (kind of) fashions, fragrance and cosmetics. The first store, on Liverpool's Lonodn Road, was family run and was the blueprint for the country's first department stores. A partnership with Owen Owens followed, which linked the store with Lewis's. TJ Hughes couldn't be more of a Liverpool bird if she ran into the nearest boozer carrying a plate of Scouse and calling everyone Queen.

In the early 2000s, it seemed perhaps this old high street staple would embrace the new online world with gusto and become a rare success story. Footfall fell but brand awareness was the new catchword. In 2005 ebay proclaimed it the first UK store to sell its main products through the auction site. A new advertising campaign was funny and helped push its e-commerce site. Featuring relatives of celebrities including Wayne Rooney's brother and Robbie Williams' dad, it showed TJ Hughes 'got' where they where on the high street pecking order. Cheap, cheerful and a bloody good deal.

Alarm bells should have started ringing when Woolworths disappeared. They grabbed a few of their empty lots but on paper it revealed a worrying trend. The theory goes like this: Online changes how we shop. We want everything in one place. We want it fashionable. We want it quick. We want it cheap. If that's the online mentality then surely recreating that setup on the high street is the key to success? If it didn't work for Woolies then maybe that's when the writing was on the wall for TJ Hughes.

Night of the long knives as Centaur cuts back Design Week, New ...

And how long will it be before other leading Centaur titles like Marketing Week, Creative Review, The Lawyer and Money Marketing follow Design Week and New Media Age into online-only publishing?

That’s where Design Week and New Media Age are headed anyway while Pitch, the website aimed primarily at ad agencies, has lost all three of its senior journalists – editor Sonoo Singh, deputy editor Louise Jack and star writer David Benady – and is being folded back into Marketing Week.

Other Centaur-ites to be culled include Design Week publisher Declan Gough, NMA publisher Andy Oakes, Creative Review publisher Jessica McDermott and long-serving Creative Review editor Lynda Relph-Knight. Libby Child, publisher of the Lawyer was fired by phone last Friday.

The next big Centaur title most at risk would seem to be Marketing Week as advertising, marketing and media titles have been hammered much harder by the flight to online than financial services or the law, both of which are much more conservative despite their reliance on the internet to keep the money rolling in.

Centaur has already closed Precision Marketing and one or two other small titles and seems to be intent on finding a business to business model built on the modest revenues from online and exhibitions.

The once-mighty Marketing Week is smaller and much less mighty (and profitable) than it once was. Now that classified advertising has largely departed it’s hard to see what future there is for the title in print.

The one flagship Centaur title that definitely wouldn’t work online is glossy monthly Creative Review, which will be a poser for the company at some stage. Maybe it will turn into a quarterly or an annual (by popular demand of course).

These moves will be watched with interest at long-term rival Haymarket, publisher of Campaign and Marketing, which announced recently that it was going to put its Brand Republic website behind a paywall in July.

Marketing Week was Centaur’s first title in the late 1970s, Campaign was Haymarket’s first B2B title in 1960s.

Taking either online only would be a big step but far bigger for Haymarket. The print version of Campaign is still a thoroughly lively organ (most UK admen still think the whole world reads it) but its Campaign Live website is a poor affair, bits of news that can be found on Brand Republic and a line-up of ‘star’ bloggers, some of whom, like Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland, don’t seem to have written for it for years.

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