Creative: Do’s and Don’ts for Great Catalog Creative

“You’ll lose prospects who see the design and immediately think you’re not right for them,” she notes. “Prospects won’t hunt, dig and search your catalog. You have three seconds to hook them. So if you sell on price, you need to get that message across very quickly.”

Do define your brand message, then find a way to convey that in the copy. Fletcher offers an example here: One of her clients, a food cataloger, has a lemon cake that truly is outstanding. “You could write copy that says, ‘This cake is outrageously good,’ and people will yawn and turn the page,” says Fletcher. “In talking with the client, however, we discovered some information about the cake’s buyers that we used in the copy.”