Branding

Your customers know what they want and expect from you. They know what your brand stands for, what they expect to find in your catalog and on your Web site, and the average prices for your merchandise. They’re also savvy about the quality and level of customer satisfaction they can expect from you. Your job, meanwhile, is to determine if you’re retaining your focus in customers’ eyes. Are you still providing the products or customer service they want? Are your copy and graphics lacking in what customers need to know before they make their purchase decisions? Do customers think your prices no longer

As a multichannel marketer, you touch your customers in many ways. In a given year, they’ll see your catalog, e-mails, postcards, package inserts, Web site and even store displays. Across these varied media, what should stay the same? What should be different? Lois Boyle, president of Mission, Kan.-based catalog consultancy J. Schmid& Associates, offers the following three tips on maintaining brand identity across multiple customer touchpoints. 1. Vary your message, not your voice. Customers will get used to the way you speak to them, notes Boyle. If the same person isn’t responsible for writing copy for every customer touchpoint, keep samples of your copy voice on

The name Brylane traditionally has been synonymous with deliberate sales growth and budget-priced, conservative clothing primarily for middle-aged, large-sized women. But when the Paris-based Redcats, the home-shopping division of French company PPR, bought the multititle cataloger in 1998, it set out to apply a broader, more aggressive — call it “worldlier” — merchandising and marketing formula to Brylane. Fast forward seven years, and although the sales growth has yet to take off, notable transformations in the merchandising and marketing approach, corporate structure and company culture all have kicked in. Two of the New York-based company’s top executives — Chairman/CEO Eric Faintreny

It would have been difficult to come away uninspired by Patrick Connolly’s keynote speech at the Annual Catalog Conference in Chicago in May. The executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Williams-Sonoma offered some sage advice for his fellow catalogers. First, don’t think of yourself as a cataloger but as a brand. And, he noted, people define your brand as much by what you sell as what you don’t sell. He shook his head at an example from one of his competitors in the kitchen marketplace: It’s begun to offer PDAs and personal groomers in its catalog. That led to Connolly’s second insight:

Free Shipping! 50% Off! Free Gift with Order. These are all common catalog offers that inspire customers to order. Obviously, promotional offers work. They boost orders and gross revenue. But which offers work best, and when and how can you use them most effectively? Should you make the same offers to both customers and prospects? To be effective, you need to know what to avoid when making promotional offers. Avoid Conditioning First, don’t condition your customers to look for offers every time they buy. Over-promoting an offer may result in a decline in your response rates. Also be careful how you use

Not many start-up catalogs can boast annual sales de-mand of more than $50 million, a one-year housefile-growth rate of a whopping 126 percent, and more than 300,000 12-month buyers. But that’s just what Crossing Pointe, the newest division of Blair Corp., has so far achieved during its first three and a half years in operation. Crossing Pointe’s mission has been to bring younger, more affluent customers to its 94-year-old parent company, Warren, PA-based Blair Corp. Officials at Blair, a veritable stalwart in the direct mail industry and the eighth largest consumer apparel cataloger in the United States, wanted to broaden their customer base, and

Many catalog managers have an idea of what they want their brand to be, only to learn through trial and error that what they want it to be may not be what it is. Likewise, in an effort to deliver something exciting to a catalog client, many creative agencies suggest remaking a brand to become more appealing to a different audience (e.g., younger, hipper, wealthier). Certainly, there may be legitimate reasons to redo your brand, but understand that it’s a difficult and complex process requiring thought and expertise to execute. Making an abrupt change and unveiling a new creative or merchandising concept could

An often-forgotten part of the marketing and circulation plan for a catalog company, especially a small- to medium-sized catalog, is public relations (PR). Although the PR, or communications, department is an important part of many corporate structures, it rarely has any formal structure within smaller-sized catalog companies. But PR can be a very effective tool, if used in conjunction with the other components of a comprehensive marketing plan. Capitalizing on PR opportunities takes dedicated effort either by someone in-house, or through an outside PR firm. Although the media exposure itself might be free, you’re going to have to spend some

Problem: Your catalog company’s management team is stretched too thin to concentrate on order-taking, pick/pack/ship, call center operations and returns management. Solution: Outsource the duties to a specialist. FrenchToast.com, a Web and print cataloger of school uniforms, did just this in 2000 when it partnered with NewRoads, an outsource fulfillment provider. Today, NewRoads handles the Dayton, NJ-based cataloger’s order-taking, shipping, customer service/call center operations and returns management. In all, New Roads handles fulfillment for about 30 catalogers. “Outsourcing allows us to do what we do best: sales, marketing and product development,” says Michael Sutton, president of FrenchToast.com, which is the direct marketing arm

After the plane landed with the photo crew, stylists, art director and models aboard, I was the first one off. I spotted the client waiting at security, all smiles. “Did you get all the permits?” I asked. The client’s smile faded. “Can we shoot downtown?” “Not quite yet,” the client said. “The national park location?” I asked. “Not exactly.” “The heliport?” “Well ...” When shooting on location, assume you’ll need a permit for everything, and each permit will take longer to get than you hoped. As a commercial venture, you have none of the freedom ordinary tourists have to take photos (especially