Catalog Doctor: Avoid the ‘Lazy Syndrome’ Epidemic
3. Help customers see all your products by using eye flow.
Good eye flow is a catalog fundamental that’s getting lost, and that translates into lost sales.
Prescription: Every time your customers turn a page, the next spread should have a visual “anchor” to grab their attention — big product, bright color, big headline, scenic, etc. Once you grab their attention, the other graphic elements need to guide their eyes around the spread and back so they see every product effortlessly. Avoid wrong guiding — if a model in the upper-right corner of a spread is looking right, customers are likely to look right, too, and lift the corner of the page and turn to the next spread without noticing the products on the left page at all.
Susan J. McIntyre is Founder and Chief Strategist of McIntyre Direct, a catalog agency and consultancy in Portland, Oregon offering complete creative, strategic, circulation and production services since 1991. Susan's broad experience with cataloging in multi-channel environments, plus her common-sense, bottom-line approach, have won clients from Vermont Country Store to Nautilus to C.C. Filson. A three-time ECHO award winner, McIntyre has addressed marketers in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, has written and been quoted in publications worldwide, and is a regular columnist for Retail Online Integration magazine and ACMA. She can be reached at 503-286-1400 or susan@mcintyredirect.com.
