Catalog Doctor: Break Out of the Catalog Mold
Attend Noncatalog Conferences
Take Ty Pennington's keynote at the DMA08 Conference. What does the host of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" have to do with catalogs? Nothing. But he explained how he meets and learns about each family for whom he designs a home. Catalog mailers study data, demographics and pie charts about their audiences. But slicing and dicing numbers about audiences isolates you from them, too. How often do you meet them one on one? Not often enough, if at all. You can't meet everyone, but meeting even a few customers makes your?catalogs more relevant.
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.
