A Sneak Preview of Our New Catalog/Multichannel Business Benchmark Report

But in this day and age, who wants to wait a whole week?! So, here’s a little taste of what’s coming in our October issue and on our Web site. We surveyed our Catalog Success e-mail file, filtered out noncatalogers and received completed surveys from 175 marketers — 97 B-to-C, 78 B-to-B.

Best to begin with the question that illustrates the changing role of the catalog itself. We asked, “What is the single most important business objective of your catalog?” Response from B-to-C and B-to-B varied considerably here. Naturally, the top response in both was to generate sales. But while 71.8 percent of B-to-B catalogers checked it off as their single most important business objective, just 57.7 percent of B-to-C respondents said sales was the most important objective.