Catalog Success

Coming on the heels of the downcast ACCM conference in New Orleans, the American Catalog Mailers Association's (ACMA) National Catalog Advocacy & Strategy Forum offered the 50 or so attendees on hand some potential relief and plenty of optimism.

This year’s ACCM, held two weeks ago in New Orleans, was the 23rd consecutive one I’ve attended. And like many of the sad few who showed up to this year’s, it left me longing for the good ole days.

In a session at the Annual Conference for Catalog & Multichannel Merchants earlier this month in New Orleans, Kevin Lee, chairman and CEO of the search engine marketing firm Didit, and Amy Wong, e-commerce marketing manager at the women's apparel retailer New York & Co., presented several takeaway tips to help companies optimize their search marketing dollars across all channels.

Like many marketers, the Spiegel Brands catalogs — Newport News, Shape FX, Carabella, A.B. Lambdin, as well as its namesake title — slowly are feeling their way around the emerging social media space. During a roundtable session at the April 15 Hudson Valley Direct Marketing Association event in Greenwich, Conn., Spiegel's marketing manager, Amy Heir, explained how she took a modest $100-a-day budget to invest in social media marketing and ran with it.

At the recent National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment in Las Vegas, Curt Barry, president of the Richmond, Va.-based multichannel operations and fulfillment consultancy F. Curtis Barry & Co., presented 15 tips on how to reduce expenses in the warehouse. Here's a rundown of his presentation:

Beyond making sure they get what they want and have positive experiences with agents when they phone in orders, perhaps the thing customers value most is the time they spend on the phone with you. In a session at the recent National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment in Las Vegas called “The Need for Speed in the Contact Center,” Jay Minnucci, president of the Philadelphia-based contact-center consulting firm Service Agility, outlined ways contact centers should operate with agility rather than clumsiness.

For those of you who don’t ordinarily attend NEMOA events, they’re usually like minireunions of longtime catalog practitioners and typically have a big "Rah! Rah! Go Catalog!" flavor to them. But the mood and whole underlying tone at the Spring 2009 NEMOA Conference held a couple of weeks ago in Boston was different from any NEMOA event I’ve ever attended.

Beyond the myriad of problems affecting so many businesses this year, you know what else is causing trouble? Consumers aren’t finding shopping fun anymore. During a presentation at the NEMOA Spring Conference in Boston in mid-March, Monica Smith, president/CEO of Morristown, N.J.-based marketing resources firm Marketsmith Inc., shared results of a recent consumer focus group her firm conducted. She offered several pointers on how marketers should react this year.

Mired in a “sea of sameness,” multichannel retailer J.C. Penney is challenged to differentiate itself from its competitors. By creating emotional connections with consumers through easy and enjoyable shopping experiences — no matter the channel — it believes it can do just that. At last month's National Retail Federation Convention in New York, Clarence Kelley, executive vice president of planning and allocation at J.C. Penney, outlined four tactics the company uses to better serve its customers.

Finding a nonstruggling multichannel retailer these days isn’t easy, but finding some that seem to know how to get through the recession is very possible. And during a session at the recent National Retail Federation Convention & Expo in New York ...