Securing the Future

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.