Check it Out: Greener Pastures for Traditional Catalogs

By offering a virtual catalog as part of their marketing mix, retailers extend both their brand reach and customer relationships by increasing sales with a favorable return on investment. It's relatively cheap to get started on one of these virtual catalog apps (significantly cheaper than a cataloger's average printing and postage costs), and they offer personalized experiences that can't be matched in a brick-and-mortar store or on a mobile or dot-com site. Throw in the fact that many consumers today are very concerned about the environment, and virtual catalog apps are a no-brainer. As a former newspaper editor, I can feel traditional print catalogers' pain, but like newspapers, catalogs seem to be going to much greener pastures.