Catalog Doctor: The Page-Smart Catalog
Prescription: Make it as easy as possible for customers to find items they might buy as a group. There are three ways to present these groupings:
- Organize your book to keep affinity products together. Most fashion catalogs use this technique, selling outfits rather than grouping all pants, then all blouses and so forth.
- Double expose appropriate products. Show the hummingbird food by the hummingbird feeders. Also show nectar along with birdseed in the food section.
- Cross-sell instead of just selling. Have text or a small photo with a caption telling where to find the book that shows how to use those tools.
Depending on your company’s product mix, you can employ all these techniques in the same catalog. But it takes focus and detailed analysis of the products on each page to do it well.
- Places:
- Portland, Ore.
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.
