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 the UK, every supermarket chain now provides a customer magazine to promote its products through recipes and other food editorial.
They also lend themselves well to measurement and tracking, offering tangible information on return on investment and performances against objectives.