No sooner had the Daily Mirror announced its 12p price cut to 20p than the 30p Sun responded, matching the Mirror's price.
Mirror publisher Trinity Mirror says the price cut is an attempt to introduce its recently revamped non-red-top format to a wider audience.
Mark Haysom, Trinity Mirror's managing director of national titles, said: "Analysis has shown that price is the most effective way of building purchase frequency and circulation. With the Mirror brand stronger than it has ever been, it's the perfect time to shout about the value of the paper."
As a way of getting people to sample the paper, as opposed to a long-term move to boost circulation, Adam Skinner, associate director at OMD UK, thinks the move a good one. "The Mirror thinks it has got a better paper and this is a way of getting people to buy it."
Backed by advertising, the move will be a costly one and, with sampling at its heart, it is also likely to be a short-lived one. On the issue of how long the battle will run for, Trinity Mirror is keeping everyone -- including rival News International -- guessing.
The main problem with this strategy is that it is fighting against Rupert Murdoch's News International and it is unlikely that Murdoch would allow the Mirror to get its hands on any of The Sun's 3.4m readers without putting up a bit of a fight.
According to Skinner: "If the Mirror puts its prices down, Murdoch was always going to follow suit. At the end of the day, it's about who has the deepest pockets and that's always going to be Murdoch."
Even if the Daily Mirror does win over readers, will it be able to keep them? There is a long-held view within the industry that price-cutting is a futile exercise and ultimately tends to attract the less loyal readers of a rival newspaper. This means that when the prices go back up, it is quite possible those readers will return to their old paper.
It is a view that Steven Goodman, group press director at MediaCom, agrees with. "The problem is that price cutting tends to attract less loyal readers from the other paper and these readers are more transient. It is also possible they won't necessarily fit in with the paper's readership profile."
No one knows the price-cutting story better than News International. Through The Times, it fought a prolonged battle against broadsheet market leader The Daily Telegraph in 1996. The Times dropped its cover price to 10p and for a while saw its circulation climb. But it did not last. When, in 1997, the price of The Times went back up, the readers it had attracted while it was 10p left. Today, the "Thunderer" at 717,281 lags almost 300,000 behind the Telegraph's 1m-plus daily sale.
Advertising is another issue. While price-cutting might deliver a short-term circulation increase this does not always translate to rate card increases -- especially if the newly won readers are not reading the whole paper, which has obvious implications for advertisers and their ads.
This issue centres on the fact that circulation increases are usually sustained for one set of ABC figures, audited over a six-month period, but once that period is past and readership drops again, there is no reason why advertisers should pay more if the circulation has not improved.
If price-cutting is so widely discredited, with long-term gains hard to come by, why do it in the first place? Well, despite its drawbacks it remains a good way of marketing a new product, or changes to a paper, and when used as part of a whole strategy it is often seen a valuable tool.
"As a marketing tool it is one that Trinity Mirror has," Goodman points out, "but I would like to see it used alongside other ideas, such as putting in more investment such as improvements to distribution and investment in the product itself."
The Daily Mirror is not the only paper to try this. Express Newspapers has recently undertaken a price-cutting strategy in certain parts of the UK to try to lure readers away from arch-rival Associated Newspaper's Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.
Like the Daily Express, it is clear what the Mirror's aim is, Goodman says. "The Mirror is without doubt trying to introduce new readers to the paper since it has changed its masthead and started to report more serious news."
Although it is unlikely that either paper will achieve sustained growth to their circulation through slashing their cover price, both will likely reap benefits.
For the Daily Mirror that will hopefully mean getting its message to a wider audience, even if it is only temporarily, while Murdoch will limit the damage to The Sun's circulation.
The move could even benefit advertisers in the short term if both papers' audiences increase, particularly if it is just for a short spell. This would see advertisers getting their products to a bigger audience at the prices they are used to paying.
The move is unlikely to help the Mirror close its gap on The Sun, which leads the tabloid race by more than 1m readers.
However, it is possible that all the Mirror wants to achieve is to get its new look and style out to people who wouldn't normally see it and, if that is all that it wants, it will probably succeed.
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