A Chat With January's Profile, Brendan Edgerton, vice president of direct marketing, Crutchfield Co. (Text & Audio)

CS: With your outlook shifting in the last six to eight months, does this signify an increased reliance on online tools such as search engine marketing and e-mail marketing?
BE: In my area we balance the whole portfolio of SEM, SEO, our affiliate space, the work we do with price-comparison sites, reports up through me, so I kind of try to manage it as a portfolio. So if cost per new buyer is getting out of alignment in one area, we'll ratchet down spend there. I wouldn't say it's a movement right now of chips on the board where we're saying, “OK, X amount of spend is not going to catalog and it's coming over here to the Web.” I'd say it's more a matter of making sure the catalog works as hard as it can — whether that's through product density, controlling who we're mailing to, controlling the frequency of our mailings. Again, the focus will be on breadth but perhaps less on depth. There are new techniques I think to developing a print strategy that is synergistic with Web, whether it's unique 800 numbers, tracking codes that convert online, that type of stuff. I think the focal point for us will be on making sure we are allocating and measuring the performance of these vehicles correctly.