Connect With Your Audience
The Five Basics of Great Catalog Creative
The Harry and David catalog tempts with tantalizing treats. Magellan’s speaks like a fellow traveler with an arm around your shoulders. Pottery Barn invites you into a warm home you want to make your own.
For today’s catalogers, being special in the minds of their customers is the competitive difference. And with 14,000-plus catalogs out there, that’s an important realization. Following are the five basic components that can help your book stand out from the crowd.
Branding and Emotion
“There’s a soul in a catalog, where the voice speaks to you on a personal level and creates a place [to which] you’d like to return,” says Carol Worthington-Levy, a San Jose-based catalog consultant.
People make decisions based on experience and emotion with only the slightest pinch of rationality. Companies have been branding their catalogs like this for years. While much ink has been spilled on the concept of branding, the bottom line is this: A brand exists only in a consumer’s mind. Branding is nothing more than how your audience thinks and feels about your company or catalog.
What’s more, emotion doesn’t exist separately in most catalogs. It comes from the total catalog experience. Great catalogers know how to turn their books into focused, coherent customer experiences. The best ones evoke specific emotions and desires—and hopefully responses from their audiences. This focus, or emotional narrative, should guide the catalog creative down to its last detail.
Covers that Motivate
Your cover seizes customers’ attention and motivates them to open the book. More than anything else, it provides the context and emotional understanding for the overall catalog experience. It articulates the values, sentiments and human desires that form the core of your catalog’s brand.
It also illustrates the value of your products. “Pottery Barn’s covers exude a warmth that elevates the perceived value of all the products inside,” says catalog designer Anne-Marie Schmutz. “The cover environment enhances the audience’s perception of product value and makes them feel the products are worth the price.”
Magellan’s covers show scenes that draw the viewer into the picture—and into the catalog itself, says Lynn Staneff, a spokesperson for the travel catalog. “We’re fond of [depicting] streets and pathways that beckon the reader inside.”
Copy that Converts
Copy not only defines and refines the emotional experience of your catalog, it’s also the linchpin that turns a reader into a buyer. All successful marketing brings about one or more conversions in its audience: It converts disinterest into interest, interest into desire, and desire into need. In a catalog, the point at which interest turns into desire or desire turns into need can be just a little bit of copy.
Effective copy converts if it’s about the audience. It needs to speak to their experiences, wishes and problems. Hello Direct is renowned for its compelling copy, which consistently addresses the needs or problems of the audience and how the catalog’s offerings solve those problems. It’s called “backhoe and fill,” a copywriter’s most dependable tool.
Photography
What makes great catalog photography? First, it’s branded—emotionally. Great photos move the catalog’s narrative forward and add to the personal experience.
Second, because photos merely substitute for products, great photography must imbue tactility, weight and motion. It involves more than just the sense of sight: It invites touch, smell and hearing, too.
The Buying Experience
If a catalog is an experience, then to be successful, it has to be a buying experience. Otherwise it’s just a free show.
However, Worthington-Levy says there are only a few catalogs that do that right, and many that don’t.
The catalog Graphic Dimensions shines in this area, she notes. “They do a very effective job of showing the size and proportion of the products, while using very easy coding and pricing charts on each product page, so you don’t have to search around,” says Worthington-Levy.
Borrowing from Web design principles, print catalog design is about making all the tasks required to buy as simple and intuitive as possible. An integral part of making this experience easier is cross-selling. “Let’s say you’re selling bed sheets,” says catalog designer Schmutz. “Rather than have small shots of the fitted sheet and pillow, showing them independently of one another, it’s better to have the shot be in a bedroom setting where you not only have the sheets and pillows, but you now show the duvet, bedskirt and shams on the bed.”
Magellan’s makes the buying experience simpler by utilizing clear readability standards. “We know our demographics,” says Staneff. “They’d rather not deal with eight-point type, as tempting as it might be to squeeze just one more product on a spread.”
To be sure, your catalog may not need the adventurous prose of J. Peterman, the upscale look of Neiman Marcus or the clever covers of Lands’ End. But it does need to connect with your customers. Decide what makes your products unique and how that translates to real human experiences for your audience.
Once you discover that, you’ll have everything you need to produce a catalog that truly reaches your customers.
David Hunter is a writer at Rothstein & Memsic (www.rmideas.com), a Los Angeles catalog design firm. He can be reached at (323) 936-0868 or by e-mail at david@rmideas.com.
