Catalog Doctor: The Lost Art of Effective Cataloging
This is by no means a comprehensive list. It's your job to think of your list and to constantly monitor and improve it. Tight budget? Limited resources? Too bad. We've all had to live with budget cuts; that's no excuse for thinking cuts.
"Put it on the page and they will come" sounds easy, but it never worked and still doesn't. That's not marketing, it's not product analysis, it's not audience analysis. It's not the blood, toil, tears and sweat that are required (yes, required) to actually put a sales-flooding-in catalog in the mail. Hard thinking is your lifeline to improved response. Do it.
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.
