Pampering Campers
His role at Camping World: Brad Ekiss manages the planning and budgeting for the direct marketing division of this multichannel merchant of camping products.
His cataloging goals: Camping World stresses the importance of keeping a sharp eye on a catalog’s profitability. “We preach the bottom line and look at it all of the time,” Ekiss notes.
Additionally, Camping World aims to build circulation models that help target the best customers. “We’ll continue to build catalog value for our customers,” he says. “We want to provide a vehicle that allows them to easily order and encourages them to want to order. Part of that plan is putting right products in front of the right customers.”
He also notes that a catalog must tell a story and become a resource for its customers. “The challenge, of course, is to profitably build that into a catalog.”
Grew up in: Kansas City, MO.
Education and early experience: University of Missouri, Kansas City, with a business degree and concentration in direct marketing. His first position out of college was with Wolferman’s catalog. And he later worked for Coldwater Creek.
Setting up camp: Camping World’s Founder David Garvin traveled to local campgrounds selling products and installing RV-related merchandise. He eventually transitioned that into a mail-order business. Garvin had a simple philosophy: “No unhappy customers, not even one.”
Ekiss’ keys to cataloging success:
• Understand the big picture of the catalog business. “It’s easy to work in a marketing department and not understand how all of the other pieces [of a catalog business] interact,” he contends. He says his past experience in circulation, advertising, customer service and merchandising have brought him the overall operational knowledge he has today.
• Strive to gain customer knowledge. “The No. 1 thing in successful direct marketing is knowing what customers want,” he notes. “Pulling the knowledge from the data is the biggest challenge.”
• Keep learning. Ekiss stresses the importance of expanding his skill set by learning from his superiors, as well as gaining knowledge in different areas of a catalog business.
Future business challenges:
• Developing the right contact strategy. “It’s difficult to decide the right time to hit on customers,” he says, “because we’re fairly seasonal, and we have customers who purchase at different times of the year.”
• Simply locating his best customers. As owners of recreational vehicles, Camping World’s best customers are indeed a pretty mobile group, says Ekiss.
Noelle Buoncristiano is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.
