Catalog Doctor: Spur Response With Unit Drivers
An item number report more accurately reflects this scenario, but still isn’t perfect. A product sales report will show two line items (one for the cardigan, one for the tank top). This is a better report, but cardigan and tank top sales still won’t rise to the top of a top-10 unit driver report because only half of the set sales will appear on each line in the report.
The Power of a Depiction-Level Sales Report
What you really want is a report that shows sales on a depiction level. A depiction-level sales report shows what sales are for all item numbers and SKUs sold in a given depiction (e.g., a single photo/copy block combination). Our example on a depiction-level sales report would show total sales for the cardigan and tank top combined for all colors and sizes. Of course, it could show item-level and SKU-level sales too. The important thing is that it also shows total sales for everything in that depiction. For catalog marketers doing pagination, depiction sales are key to profitable decision making.
Oddly, in my 30 years in this business I’ve rarely seen depiction-level sales reports available. My company recently took a client’s item number sales report and manually combined sales for the item numbers in each depiction to get total sales per depiction. From that we generated a new top-10 unit drivers report. When we compared the new depiction sales report to the old item number report we saw dramatic shifts in sales ranking. What originally looked like the No. 1 unit driver moved all the way down to No. 9. A multi-SKU depiction that wasn’t on the original top 10 report shot up to No. 1. This new report completely changed the client’s thinking on how to paginate their next catalog.
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.
