Branding

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

Brand recognition is a critical element of success for any company today, both home and abroad. That target audience includes more than just those who speak English. Foreign language-speaking customers also evaluate your brand based on the material you’ve provided in their languages. To ensure you maximize your investment in translation and avoid embarrassing translation errors, here are three ways to help you effectively reach all of your prospects. 1. When searching for a translator, find one that ensures the use of professional translators, along with a quality-control process to guarantee that your translation is accurate. 2. Your translator should understand

Bounceback programs are often limited to inserting a copy of your most recent catalog — preferably with a different cover — into the fulfillment box. But as shipping rates, fuel surcharges and paper costs all increase, more catalogers are opting against this approach. They’ve run the numbers, and their incremental sales from those catalogs no longer justify the expense. If you’re in this position, or are wondering how to leverage shipping expenses, try a strategically planned and formally managed bounceback program. A bounceback program can help build your brand, improve customer retention and develop a new revenue stream, regardless of whether you’re in B-to-C

Ordinarily, I try not to get terribly personal in this space. What we do here — put out a B-to-B magazine, a weekly e-newsletter and an informational Web site, rather than a catalog, sales-oriented e-mail or e-commerce Web site — isn’t a whole lot like what you do. We do share a common bond, of course: the catalog/multichannel business is our daily focus. This month, however, I did find a common bond in our daily regimen and thought I’d share a recent rebranding experience we had. As always, I hope you’ll gain some ideas you can apply to your own business. Late

Editor’s Note: This is the first article of a three-part series on becoming more proficient and adapting to the multichannel world. Parts two and three will appear in our June and September issues. Can you imagine a catalog/multichannel company not striving to become more efficient and effective in each selling channel in which it operates? Certainly not. This article focuses on the key issues and trends impacting multichannel selling today. It examines how you can improve your bottom line in each channel, cuts to the chase and identifies seven issues that smart direct sellers need to focus on this year. (You can also

Over the past few months, we at Catalog Success have been hard at work to further develop a hefty well of research data for our readers. In October we launched the Catalog Success Latest Trends Report, a quarterly series of original benchmarking research we’ve been conducting with the multichannel ad agency Ovation Marketing. In the coming months, we’ll also be running a series of mail volume charts provided by several catalog co-op databases. Like the Latest Trends surveys, these will run in the IndustryEye section of our print magazine. And for the past year or so, we’ve been running a regular reader poll.

Since mailing its first catalog in 1983, Doctors Foster & Smith gradually has built a name for itself in the direct marketing pet-supplies business. But as of last year, the Rhinelander, Wis.-based cataloger still was searching for a way to propel itself to becoming a household name. So to boost its brand and name recognition, as well as build sales, it launched a TV advertising campaign. The company signed on with A. Eicoff & Co., a Chicago-based direct response advertising agency specializing in TV marketing. “We wanted people to get to know who we are,” says Gordon Magee, Internet marketing and analysis manager for