Branding

As a career business journalist, my first job out of college was back in the early '80s as an assistant editor with Catalog Showroom Business. This business magazine went belly-up by the late '80s. So, too, did much of the catalog showroom industry over the next decade or so. Oddly enough, all these years later, I see some common bonds between that business and the tri-channel retailing business of today, which I'll get to in a moment.

Magazine Space Ads Grab New Names for Paul Fredrick; GreatSkin's Unique Affiliate Program Delivers Prospects; Zappos Turns to Magalogs for Leads.

Having come a long way from its modest beginning as a chain of floral shops in metropolitan New York, 1-800-Flowers.com usually has set trends, not followed them.

Can you maintain your brand’s “look and feel” on an outbound phone call? Does your fulfillment packaging reinforce your company’s “one thing”? Is your brand clearly understood in your print catalog, but misinterpreted in your e-mail campaigns?

This year's economic retreat actually stands to help Gaiam, a product and information services company with a heavy emphasis on sustainability, position itself for greater growth in the near future.

One morning a few months ago, I experienced a true moment. I realized that, after spending the majority of my 25-plus-year career covering the catalog business, that business can no longer be treated as such. Today, it's really about selling and serving any way the consumer wants you to.

Have you ever walked into a store and felt like you’d stepped into that company’s catalog? Or visited a familiar company’s Web site and intuitively known where to find what you need because the site’s organized just like its store across town? Regardless of channel, your experience is the same: You experience that brand.

In this age of economic uncertainty, it’s imperative that your brand stands for something and resonates in the hearts of customers and prospects. Most marketers are under the misconception that a great brand is only about the logo, tagline, color palette and looking the same across all channels. While those are important tactical procedures, they’re not enough to create brand advocacy or insistence. You need a “sticky” brand. In a session I co-presented at the DMA08 annual conference in Las Vegas last week, with Keith Eldred, project manager at New Pig Corp., a B-to-B cataloger of industrial safety products, we examined how to build

In a presentation at last week’s eTail East 2008 conference in Washington, D.C., Barry Judge, chief marketing officer for the consumer electronics giant Best Buy, presented five concepts his company strives to accomplish to ensure its customers have an enjoyable shopping experience, no matter the channel. 1. Make sure the customer knows all that we know. Examples of this include Best Buy publishing the return rates for all of the products it sells, publishing service rates for personal computers, among others, Judge said. 2. Deliver an experience that adds value. Be sure to deliver on all of your promises, Judge advised. 3. Blow the

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a three-part series on becoming more adept and adapting to the multichannel world. Part one appeared in our February issue, and part three will appear in our September issue. The world of direct marketing is changing quickly. Whole new analytical tools, benchmarks and ratios have become commonplace in measuring success. You must think cross-channel if you’re to be customer-centered. And above all else, if you’re a stand-alone cataloger or retail store operator, the corporate atmosphere is forcing you to rethink your internal culture. The opposite of a multichannel approach is a channel-centric one, where one channel dominates