There are an awful lot of women's magazines out there. Sometimes it seems like there can't be another inch of space left on newsagents' shelves for the weight of publications full of tales of mums who ran off with their daughters' boyfriends, sex-op secrets of the stars and miracle one-day diets - yet new ones keep on coming.
Forty-seven per cent of the total magazine market in the UK is taken up with women's weeklies. The likes of Closer, Love It!, Pick Me Up and Real People entertain their readers with a combination of buoyant friendliness and real-life dramas.
And that's one area where the more traditional titles might have a problem. Matriarch of the weeklies is the 75-year-old Woman's Own. It's a huge brand, but not one that, up to now, has captured the sort of slightly breathless excitement pushing up circulation figures elsewhere.
All that, according to the title's publishers, IPC Connect, is about to change. The magazine, which was launched in 1932 with a covermount of three skeins of wool, relaunched last week with a £2m marketing budget.
The new Woman's Own is the result of eight months of research into the sort of woman who buys the title and what she wants out of it. Its editor, Karen Livermore, and her team found a "gap" between how the readers, typically women aged 35-plus, saw themselves - confident, outgoing, loves to gossip and shop - and how they saw other Woman's Own readers: settled, middle aged, mumsy, loves cooking and is a loyal friend and neighbour.
This is the attitude gap Ms Livermore intends to tackle, but she has a battle on her hands, as these old-fashioned perceptions of the title are almost certainly shared by the wider marketplace. In fact, though more restrained than many rivals, Woman's Own has not been "mumsy" and "middle aged" for years. If it had, sales would have dropped even further than they have - circulation has plummeted in the past 10 years, from 808,311 in 1996 to 356,811 in December 2006. Despite this, it is still the 21st biggest-selling magazine on the UK news-stand.
Like any long-running brand, Woman's Own has been through many redesigns. The magazine thrived in the war years, giving readers advice on running their homes at a time when luxuries were scarce. It later adapted to changing fashions and continued to dominate the market into the 1960s and beyond.
Content was a cheerful mix of home, cookery, fashion and beauty advice set alongside wholesome reports on Royals and film stars. But the magazine was never purely about entertainment - there was a perceived responsibility to inform the reader too. Incredibly, Margaret Thatcher's infamous and oft-quoted line "There is no such thing as society" first appeared in an interview in Woman's Own in October 1987.
Just as Tony Blair was to do later, Thatcher talked to Woman's Own because she knew it was an effective way of reaching swathes of women.
In spite of this, magazine circulations were in gentle decline when, in the late Eighties, two German companies, Bauer and Gruner + Jahr, launched their own titles into the UK market and changed everything. The newcomers, Best and Bella, brought shorter, snappier reads and a new, "value-for-money" feel.
In 1990 Bauer launched Take a Break, and suddenly dramatic "real-life" stories were the undisputed currency of women's weeklies. Woman's Own responded gamely, relaunching with its own strong true-life stories, and as the popularity of television soaps soared, carrying interviews with stars of the small screen alongside the errant dads, miracle births and tales of bravery in the face of cancer.
Further competition came with the launch in 2002 of Emap's Closer, which set new standards in celebrity gossip and paparazzi pictures. When Grazia came along a few years later, calling itself a "weekly glossy", yet another genre was born.
For traditional titles to survive, reinvention has been the name of the game for the past 20 years. So what is so different about the relaunched Woman's Own?
"Woman's Own had lost connections with its readers," says Ms Livermore. "Their median age is 48 and that hasn't changed - what has changed is that women in their 40s are very different now. Yes, lots of our readers are housewives and they have homes to run, but they don't want to be reminded of it.
"Weekly readers can be an unforgiving lot. They are no one's fools - they are savvy and clued up. They're sick of tired old magazine speak - if they're on a diet, they don't want to be told to get off the bus one stop early for the exercise."
The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures show that weekly magazine sales are growing. The woman's weekly market now accounts for 476.8 million sales per year. IPC Connect snaps up 125.9 million of those with seven titles, including Woman's Own, Woman, Woman's Realm and Woman's Weekly, giving it a 26.4 per cent share. That share is worth £101m, and IPC is putting a lot behind this reinvention of its oldest and most famous brand.
"Our challenge has been to launch the magazine as if it's launching for the first time in 2007," Ms Livermore says. "We have completely pulled it apart. We'd develop a section, try it out at two or three focus groups and then use the information to redesign it and test a different version the following night."
Last week's issue definitely looked different, with bolder colours and cleaner, fresher lines. The cover is a glamorous pap shot of Sharon Osbourne, while GMTV's Richard Arnold has added a new TV column.
The content is not so very different but somehow the tone of the magazine is livelier, brighter and cheekier. A double-page spread is headed "Forget Wags - meet the Goddesses" and reports on groups of "fun, feisty, fabulous and 40-ish" women.
The cover price has risen from 78p to 85p; the paper stock has been upgraded and there is a new, seven-page section of news, views and celebrity gossip.
Where magazines used to compete for reader loyalty, these days research shows women are buying across the market, picking up several titles each week, a practice termed "repertoire buying" by the marketing teams.
"The Woman's Own reader will get her hardcore real life from Chat or Pick Me Up. She expects something else from Woman's Own," says Livermore.
So is there room for the all-new Woman's Own in today's crowded market? The biggest hurdle is not so much in producing a great magazine - it's in getting across to the reader that Woman's Own is no longer about knitting a nice sweater and finding a good recipe for dinner.
This kind of change in perception can happen with well-established brands - but it's a hefty rabbit to pull out of the hat.
