Longer Road Needed to Go Hollywood

Hollywood Gadgets has a wonderful assortment of products. Unique and interesting, it’s a catalog you know will do well if you can get it opened and perused. Therein lies the challenge. This catalog is filled with potential, but undertapped opportunities.

Front Cover
Perhaps with all the best intentions, this cata-loger may feel it has worked hard on the front cover, but is it also working smart? A lot of people might applaud putting the product in a lifestyle setting, but is that enough? Is it compelling? Dramatic? Emotional? Relevant? Differentiated? If you put your hand over the logo, would you know whose catalog it was?

The cover throws a mishmash of information, color and images at you. Your eye doesn’t know where to go first. The problem isn’t that the cataloger is trying to do too much and ought to cut the messaging. Hollywood Gadgets just needs to do it differently. Here are five quick fixes that will turn around the cover.

1. Treat the logo as a masthead. Place it higher and bigger on the front cover. Customers want to see it. Previously mailed prospects may recognize it and new prospects will think it looks more important. And Hollywood Gadgets should get rid of the “G” in a circle, it’s probably not meaningful to anyone except the people who put the catalog out, and on the cover it’s just distracting.

2. Use dot whacks for offers, not for information. Customers expect to see free S&H, reduced dollars or a percentage off prices in those treatments. The free gift is the only thing that warrants a dot whack. Use type treatments, screened back space or perhaps a banner to communicate the number of new products, which is another important message for this audience.

3. Prioritize the information. Place copy flush left on either side of the page (something many magazines do) in easy-to-read, bold black type. A category list in the middle of the page that’s in centered, reversed type is very hard to read.