So You Want to Start a Catalog

Huh?! “You mean you haven’t got any product?”

“Not yet, but we will. Here on this map is where we’ll build our bottling plant. We want pre-built demand when it’s ready.”

“Then you’ll need to spend a lot of money,” I said.

Bob had missed a key point about leverage. If you want to leverage catalog growth, your lever already ought to exist. Because Bob wanted to do guerrilla marketing (read: under-financed), and because he lacked pre-existing levers that might have compensated for a small budget, he was forced to start small and slow. The explosive growth hoped for never materialized, and the program fizzled after two or three years.