How to handle your catalog’s midlife crisis

By Sarah Fletcher

A catalog redesign has a lot in common with a midlife crisis makeover. There comes a time in every catalog’s life — if it’s lucky to survive long enough — when it looks around at the competition and feels ugly, frumpy and over the hill. And though there’s no single redesign shape up solution that fits everyone, we all travel the same path. So here are 10 steps to a “new you.”

1. Do you really need a whole new you, or just a haircut?
Before you start looking at new fonts and cover treatments, determine the purpose of your redesign.

• Is it for the customer you have, the one who likes you just the way you are but could use a little something to relight the passion you once shared?

• Or is it for a new customer who — and we need to be honest with ourselves here — would never be attracted to the old you?

If you’re designing for the customer you already have, do some tweaking to get where you want to be. Be guided by the old saying, “Less is more.”

If you want to appeal to a different customer, you’ll need more radical changes. Letting go is hard; you should talk to your marketing people, because they may not be ready to give up your old customers even if you are. Evolution is often more successful than revolution.

Most Telling Attributes
Here are a few customer attributes to think about when designing your new look:
• male or female
• age range
• educational level
• interests (sports, movies, reading, travel, crafts, etc.)
• ethnic background
• trendy or traditional
• cheap or chic
• early adopters vs. mainstream users.

The more you know about your customer the better. B-to-B companies need to focus more on the attributes of the companies they’re selling to and less on the personal attributes of the people who make the purchases.

2. Don’t try to be something that you aren’t.
Every catalog has things it does better than the competition — namely, key brand attributes. With this in mind, define your key brand attributes, and showcase them. If you got it, flaunt it!

• If your key brand attribute is having the lowest price, then you’re appealing to a frugal customer. Avoid things that make you look like a spendthrift.

• If your key brand attribute is the largest assortment in the industry, you’re appealing to customers who appreciate lots of choices and/or the convenience of one-stop shopping. Focus on helping them make the best choice.

3. Put yourself squarely in the eye of the beholder.
Take time to go through your catalog the way your customers do. For instance, if your ideal customer is female, 35 to 55, educated, likes reading and travel, is Latino, trendy, more chic than cheap, and a mainstream user, pretend to be her and go through your catalog and actually shop for something. Develop an information hierarchy of what you (she) need(s) to make a purchase. If yours is a gifts catalog, the first information hurdle is who’s she buying for? Therefore, make sure it’s easy to find gifts by recipient type.

If her next information hurdle is price, help her find products in appropriate price ranges.

Once she’s narrowed her search, determine what product information she needs to make a purchase by asking yourself the following.
• Are the benefits, features and product specs fully explained?
• How easy is it to place an order?
• Are the SKUs, prices, sizes and colors easy to understand?
• How easy is it to contact you?
• Are your Web address, phone number and other contact info easy to find?

4. Does this photo make my page look big?
Standing in front of the mirror can be revealing. By determining what you like and don’t like about your existing creative, you can give your design team better direction on what, and how much, to change. Go over this list as a team to start:
• logos
• icons
• catalog size
• photography
• typography
• colors
• structure/pagination
• product density
• headlines
• body copy
• call-outs
• editorial
• testimonials
• table of contents.

Resist the urge to throw up your hands and say, “I hate everything! I just want to look like (insert competitor’s name here)!” You don’t want to look like your competition. You want to be the dazzling you that reflects your key attributes.

5. Showcase your best features, and downplay your flaws.
Identify your 10 best and 10 worst products. These will tell you a lot about what your customers are buying and what they just don’t care about. Focus the majority of your time and effort on showcasing the top 10. Increasing sales of these items by 5 percent or 10 percent will pay far greater dividends than increasing the sales of your worst products by 20 percent or 30 percent — and it’s much easier to do.

6. Get your creative juices flowing.
Put together a file of things you think your customer would like. These could be cocktail napkins or a painting, or clippings from a magazine. Don’t get caught in a catalog-only mentality. Great ideas come from all sorts of places. (Our company logo was sparked by a 1950s parking sign!)

Use competitors’ catalogs as idea starters, but remember that you don’t want to look like them. Plus, they probably don’t have the same key brand attributes you do.

7. Have a little fun before you settle down with one look.
It’s easy to fall in love with the first design you produce, but don’t stop there. Go at it from several angles. Produce at least three versions of a new design, each including a cover, a high-density spread and a low-density spread.

8. Model your new looks.
Half the fun of doing a redesign is showing off all the exciting possi-bilities. If you’re lucky enough to have the budget for focus groups, they’re a wonderful way to get customer feedback. If you don’t have that luxury, reach out to the people around you for feedback.

Larger companies usually have a pool of decision makers who need to weigh in. Try to keep everyone focused on the target customer rather than your decision makers’ own personal tastes. Ask people to pretend to shop the page. Pretty is nice, but ease of shopping is what rings the cash register.

9. Weed out your closet.
Once you’ve had your fun with all the new creative possibilities and have gotten lots of feedback, roll up your sleeves to keep the good stuff while weeding out the bad. Get the details right, and make the final version the best it can be. But no matter how good you are, there will still be rolling changes. My mother is fond of saying, “It takes two to be a genius: one to do it, and one to tell the other when to stop.”

10. Become the “new you.”
It takes time for customers to recognize the “new you.” The more radical the changes, the more time they’ll need to fully embrace you. Brand power is created by long-term customer recognition, so give customers time to get used to your new look.

Inevitably, some day they’ll begin taking the “new you” for granted. And not much further down the road, you’ll have to start thinking about another makeover. As a good rule of thumb, however, don’t do major overhauls more than once every three years to five years. If you keep the look of your book up to date, you can stretch its lifespan out even longer.

Sarah Fletcher is creative director of Catalog Design Studios, a Providence, R.I.-based consulting firm. Reach her at sfletcher@catalogdesignstudios.com or (401) 490-0530.