How to Waste Your Marketing Dollars

When you call a catalog advertising agency, designer or copywriter, you expect to have things your way. After all, you have the cash.

While you certainly can have things your way, the strongest-selling catalogs generally are those in which the cataloger has worked as a partner with — not a dictator to — the creative team.

How can you bring a detailed knowledge of your product line and customers to the table, without smothering the creative process with non-negotiable rules? Following are four guidelines that may help.

1. Leave your quirks at the door.

A national manufacturer with a highly respected brand launched a consumer catalog, hired a catalog agency to produce it, but assigned an inside manager to oversee the program. The inside manager was a level-headed businessperson, but he dressed in a quirky way. He didn’t think this was odd; he considered it a point of distinction, a mark of good taste — and he began imposing that taste on the catalog. Soon, every shot in the catalog reflected the manager’s odd style, impairing the catalog’s selling effectiveness.

A common source of reduced selling effectiveness is a cataloger imposing an odd personal belief on the catalog team. I don’t mean truly bizarre things that are easy to identify. Rather, I’m referring to subtle personality quirks that in personal life may just make your friends smile, but when imposed onto a catalog, can do real damage to sales.

How can you identify such quirks in yourself? Make a short list of the things you feel very strongly about in your catalog’s creative presentation. Those are precisely the things about which you’re most likely to be wrong and the areas in which you’re most likely to do damage.

For example, a cataloger I know changed agencies every couple years, because the owner was convinced that sales depended on how perfectly neutral the color of its stainless steel products were printed in the book. I assured this cataloger that I could achieve perfect color neutrality, which I did by photographing and separating the stainless steel products totally in black and white. The final printed images contained no magenta, cyan or yellow dot.

The result: The owner still “saw” color staining in the images, and he switched agencies, again depriving his catalog of a production team that had learned something about his customers and product line.

2. Resist the urge to rewrite your copywriter’s copy.

A national cataloger hired a catalog agency to reposition its mature title in the face of growing competition. The cataloger adopted a new look and copy style after split-testing showed a double-digit increase in sales to its audience. After a couple of years though, the head of the company decided she didn’t like it, and began personally rewriting it in a totally different, highly promotional style — without testing it first.

Of all the talented individuals needed to produce a catalog, great copywriters usually are the hardest to find. And yet copy is the one thing that catalogers are most likely to write themselves. I find this strange. Most catalogers know they can’t draw or take commercial-grade photos. So why don’t they know they can’t write optimized commercial catalog copy?

If you dislike the copy in your catalog, test other copywriters and competing copy styles. Or give your current copywriters better information, explaining exactly what you’re trying to accomplish. 3. If your creative team’s suggestions seem ridiculously wrong, consider that they may be right.

Once a year for more than a decade, an apparel cataloger called in top-level creative professionals from all specialties to review her catalogs. The team spent a week identifying weaknesses, exploring alternatives and proposing improvements. At the week’s end, the cataloger reviewed everything and rejected it all. She then repeated the process the next year. Sales declined each year.

This example seems almost foolish, but the cataloger is one of the smartest people I know. For several years, she didn’t recognize the pattern she was repeating. A cataloger solicits, then totally rejects, the advice of veteran professionals, and opts instead for a path that he or she devises, often in consultation with a next-door neighbor or office assistant.

4. Don’t over-economize.

A niche, upscale catalog experienced several prosperous years. So no one was concerned when cutbacks were needed to offset excesses in other areas. The catalog still looked fresh with outtakes from prior years. But by the third year of cutbacks, the catalog was definitely suffering, and so were sales. Cutbacks originally planned as minor and temporary had gone too deep, setting off a spiral of smaller budgets, weaker catalogs and less sales.

During the booming 1990s, many catalogers overspent — sometimes so much that their catalogs’ survival was threatened. But lately I’ve noticed that many catalogers are drastically under-spending.

How can you tell when your economizing has gone too far? Decreasing sales is one sign, but so many things affect sales that it’s hard to use sales as a sole indicator of a problem. Answer instead this question: Is the presentation of your catalog still supporting its price points, inspiring the aspirations of its audience and presenting fresh material to its repeat buyer?

If you answer “no,” your economizing has gone too far. It may seem easy to cut catalog production costs when budgets are tight, but your catalog is the one part of your company that every customer actually sees. Look for cuts in less-visible areas, or in parts of your operation that will impact only a subset of your customers.

Susan McIntyre is president of McIntyre Direct, a full-service catalog agency and consulting firm based in Portland, OR. She can be reached at (503) 286-1400.