A Chat With April’s Profile, Tim Burns, brand manager of Edmund Scientific

CS: Looking back over your career, what would be the biggest mistake you made? How did you recover from that mistake?
TB: This is interesting. People ask me that question and this is generally what I say: When I first came in, one of the things that made me nuts is that the copy always included dimensions — sizes: length, width, height, diameter,weight. One of the challenges I had was the density of the catalog. Edmund Scientific has typically always been a very dense catalog. So one of the things I did to make it more appealing, in the copy anyways, was to cut out all those dimensions so I could add more headline copy so the product pages sold a little bit harder.
I found out quickly that that was a mistake. Because our customers, that’s how they think. That’s one of the first things they want to know when they’re looking at something — how big it is. They think dimensionally. While I didn’t find that information particularly interesting or helpful, our customers considered it key. So I had to go back and fix all those products where I pulled the dimensions out of the copy.