A Chat With September’s Profile, Scott Drayer, director of marketing, Paul Fredrick MenStyle

CS: What about the catalog/multichannel business appeals most to you?
SD: At this point, new challenges. Understanding the behavior that customers have with so many different influencers: Did they make the purchase online because they got the catalog and then went to Google and searched on our brand term, kind of cutting through all of that clutter of data? Trying to figure out what the true answer behind that behavior is. I find that very interesting — can’t say that I’ve figured it out, but I definitely find it interesting. One of the biggest challenges that we have right now in figuring out as an industry, I would think.

CS: What do you think the biggest challenge will be for Paul Fredrick for the remainder of this year and in future years?
SD: For Paul Fredrick, I would say it’s taking advantage of new technology … being able to personalize an experience for a customer to be the most effective marketers that we can be. That’s pretty much what my challenge is going to be over the next several years, especially with cost pressures.

CS: Specifically, what would some of these technologies be?
SD: Well, I think they’re more readily accessible these days online — things like internal search and automated merchandising, general segmentation and personalization of both the Web site and e-mail communications. We’re still trying to break out of the “We have X number e-mail file and every Tuesday and Friday we’re going to mail a message to them.” We want to make sure that we’re sending a valuable message that’s going to make them want to open it. And it’s relevant to them.
In terms of offline, we’ve seen some interesting things start to happen in regards with variable printing. We’ve just started to get our feet wet with that. I think that’s going to be something that’s moving forward at a fairly rapid pace. The quality is starting to be fairly good for that. And really kind of taking advantage of the ability to communicate differently to customer A vs. customer B in a mass marketing event, yet still retaining personalization.