B-to-B Insights: Catalog Curb Appeal

When you’re selling your house, you plant flowers in the front yard, keep the lawn mowed and maybe touch up the trim with fresh paint. Your home’s curb appeal catches prospective buyers’ interest as they drive by. You have just a few seconds to convince them to step on the brake instead of hitting the gas. The same principle applies to your catalog covers.

Here’s how to plan your covers for traffic-stopping curb appeal:

First, make a list of your best-selling products. You’ll probably end up with more cover ideas than you have opportunities to mail. That’s good. Go ahead and begin development on all of them. Some ideas won’t work, but some may surprise you.

Front covers: Think of your front covers as a series of promotions highlighting your most important merchandise. Always put your best-selling and newly developed products that you believe will become best-sellers front and center. Your top customers and prospects will be receiving most, if not all, of your catalogs during the course of the year. This is your opportunity to show them the products they’re most likely to want. Design each front cover with a single product as the main focus for dramatic stopping power.

If you have best-selling products that are seasonal in nature, plan on beginning your schedule with those. For example, veterinary supply catalogs have months when flea and tick treatments are top sellers. First slot your best-selling seasonal products on covers during the appropriate seasons, then take the remaining best-sellers and pencil them in for your other covers.

Back covers: With your products for the front covers selected, it’s time to turn your attention to the back covers. Typically you’ll want to highlight two or three top-selling products, each from different categories. Remember that the back cover often gets seen first since mail is usually delivered with the address panel facing up.

Just because a product appears on the front cover for one drop doesn’t mean it can’t appear on the back cover for another. It’s fine to repeat products on the back cover, just make sure they aren’t on the front and back covers at the same time.

Once again, first look for any products that are seasonally appropriate. During the winter holidays, banking supply companies see an increase in sales of currency gift envelopes. The season lasts about three months, but they don’t want customer gift envelopes on the front cover of every catalog during that time. Since they’ve already placed the envelopes on the front cover for the optimal month, slotting gift envelopes on the back cover for the other drops during the selling season is a good idea.

Sketch: Begin your cover creative with a pencil at your desk, not a camera in the studio. Thumbnail sketches are a quick way to see whether a concept is working or not. The thumbnail stage is also a good time to experiment with headlines. See how your text and images work together for both design and overall sales impact. Once you’ve got your approach, take a bit more time and draw a rough sketch of your completed concept. You don’t have to be Rembrandt, you just need some basic skills to get your ideas on paper.

Creating a series of rough drafts is a powerful planning tool. Pin them to a wall to see the year’s promotional efforts at a glance. This is the message you’ll be sending to customers and prospects. Is it a compelling one? At this point, you usually add or delete ideas to round out your message and create more impact.

Discuss: With your sketches in hand, it’s time to discuss ideas with your photographer. When photographers understand how the headline text will interact with the final image, they can plan to have simple backgrounds in the specific places where the text will fall. If possible, have actual samples of the product on hand during this meeting. This helps when discussing props, backgrounds and lighting.

Cover tests show that light, bright covers tend to outperform dark ones. You can have drama in your camera angles, but be careful of having dark, moody images on your covers. You certainly want to show the form and texture of your products, but as a general rule you’ll want to avoid extremes in lighting and depth of field for cover photography.

You’ll want cover images to fit into your overall brand look and feel. Cover shots don’t have to exactly match how your internal products are photographed, however, you don’t want a dramatic difference between your cover shot and inside product shots.

Shoot: Set aside a block of time to focus attention on capturing cover shots. For most B-to-B catalogs, product images are shot on seamless white backgrounds and the quantity of images is emphasized over their quality. Cover shots are different. You may shoot dozens of tabletop product shots a day but only get through three cover shots.

Refer to your sketches as you’re setting up your images. Take the time to experiment with reflective surfaces for potential backgrounds. You have the opportunity to really work the lighting to create a bright, dramatic effect.

When you follow this approach to planning and creating your covers, you’ll find that they’re no longer an afterthought but a driving force for your creative and selling effort. You elevate your covers to targeted selling messages that catch your customers’ eyes, giving your covers curb appeal.

George Hague is principal of multichannel consulting firm HAGUEdirect. George can be reached at georgehague@haguedirect.com.