Contributions to Profit The 40-40-20 Rule

The moral of the story: Understand what drives results for your brand. In this case, the old "shabby" catalog was seen as a cost-effective way for customers and prospects to make their purchases. No creative window dressing was going to change that.

In another instance, a client of mine did an A/B split test to see if better paper affected results in a positive way. When we did a postmortem analysis, what we saw was that while response and sales per catalog mailed were slightly up in a few housefile and prospecting segments, the additional cost of the paper wasn't covered by the increases in sales.