a customer magazine is a magazine produced by a business as a means of communicating to its customers. it is a branch of custom media, a product that broadly shares the look and feel of a newsstand or consumer magazine but is paid for in part or whole by a business. rather than copy sales and advertising, the primary goal of a customer magazine is to achieve a particular business objective. this could be for a firm to cross- or up-sell, change brand perception or engender loyalty. in-flight magazines, sponsored by airlines, were among the first customer magazines, and remain typical of the genre. in the uk, every supermarket chain now provides a customer magazine to promote its products through recipes and other food editorial. many prominent digitally-native companies, like webmd and net-à-portér, have released customer magazines of their own. some customer magazines carry advertising; this is often seen as a useful way to offset the cost but equally can have some benefit in making the product look more like a regular magazine.