Catalog Doctor: Spur Response With Unit Drivers
Oddly, in my 30 years in this business I’ve rarely seen depiction-level sales reports available. My company recently took a client’s item number sales report and manually combined sales for the item numbers in each depiction to get total sales per depiction. From that we generated a new top-10 unit drivers report. When we compared the new depiction sales report to the old item number report we saw dramatic shifts in sales ranking. What originally looked like the No. 1 unit driver moved all the way down to No. 9. A multi-SKU depiction that wasn’t on the original top 10 report shot up to No. 1. This new report completely changed the client’s thinking on how to paginate their next catalog.
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.
