The latest adventure of “Harry Potter and the case of the extending tail”.

Earlier this week Bloomsbury released their latest set of financial results. Bloomsbury are a publisher and their list of titles includes the ubiquitous Harry Potter books.

Their 2009 results showed a fall in pre-tax profits of 35% with earnings falling from £11.6 million to £7.7 million.

As keen muggles know (if you don’t know what a muggle is then ask somebody that has read a Harry Potter book!), there hasn’t been a new Harry Potter book for a while now and such was the success of them that without new ones coming into the pipeline there was bound to be an impact on the results.

Students will be aware of the product life cycle where products go through different stages ranging from introduction, growth, maturity and ultimately to decline. The decline stage of the product life cycle is often referred to as the “tail”.

Efforts are often made to extend the tail by use of the marketing mix (product, price, place and promotion).

Bloomsbury have announced that in November of this year they are planning on re-releasing all seven Harry Potter books.

Will the stories be different?

No they won’t but what will be different are the covers. Each book cover will be illustrated by artist Clare Melinsky. In other words, the product will remain largely the same (in terms of the story) but there will be small changes (the “collectors” covers).

This is a good example of amending the Product within the marketing mix to extend the tail.

Of course, the launch date of November 2010 is no accident as I’m sure there will be some happy people on Christmas day opening some new gift sets of Harry Potter books.