What Your Peers Are Doing and What It Should Mean to You: Focus On a Trade Group, Foreign Customers, Conference Travel and Search

Last fall, we launched a reader poll on our Web site, CatalogSuccess.com. If you’re a cataloger/multichannel marketer and you’ve never seen it or voted (anonymously, of course), I encourage you to do so. You’ll find it on the top-right corner of our home page.

As I thought about what to write in this edition of The Corner View, it dawned on me that we’re sitting on some pretty useful information. So I decided to take a look at some of our past poll results and offer my two cents on what they mean to you — and how you might want to react.

In future editions of this newsletter, I’ll periodically visit our poll results and ponder what they mean to you. For now, let’s tackle some recent ones. Before I do so, let me remind you that all of our poll results are not scientific and sometimes are not statistically valid. Nevertheless, in this day and age of instant Internet polling, they certainly can give you a very good idea of what your peers are saying, doing, know, don’t know, etc.

What’s ACMA???

The most recent poll question was, “Have you joined, or are you planning to join, the recently formed American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA)?” The results of this poll really blew my mind. In addition to simple “yes” and “no” responses, we threw in a third option, “I don’t know what this is,” almost as an afterthought. Guess what? 63 percent of you said you don’t know what it is, whereas 22 percent said they’ve joined or intend to join and 15 percent said they haven’t.

A quick primer: the American Catalog Mailers Association is a real trade association that was formed in April to represent catalogers’ interests, primarily during postal rate cases. In light of the punishing May postage increase, several catalogers came together to form the group. (For more on this, please read my Editor’s Take column in the upcoming July 2007 print issue of Catalog Success, which will also be available on our site at the beginning of the month.)