Can Creative Lightning Strike Twice?
The following is a true story. The names have been changed to protect, well, me.
Some time ago, I was hired to run, actually turn around, a consumer mail order company that sold apparel and accessories. The company sold high-quality products to a niche market, and prospecting wasn’t so easy. Sales and profits were declining despite the fact that the company’s industry was seeing a growth spurt.
We decided, as part of the overall turnaround strategy that the catalog’s image needed a makeover.
Frankly, the catalog looked horrible, so we hired a great catalog agency to fix things.
The agency re-did everything from our logo to the color palette. It even started photographing our products in a way that made them look more like what you got when you received your shipment.
But in the process of redesigning everything, we forgot one of the cardinal rules of direct marketing: test before you rollout! In this case, however, we got lucky.
We mailed the new catalog and response went up, customer acquisition costs went down, and, just as importantly, returns went down (leaving us greater gross profit).
And I built a great relationship with this agency. Very soon the entire process was running smooth as silk.
But the president of the company wasn’t satisfied. Somehow he/she had lost control of the catalog between the agency and myself. It was clear to any observer that the president wanted control back, so he/she decided to bring the creative development back in-house.
Let me pause at this point to ask you what you’d do in this circumstance. Would you decide you can do better by bringing the creative in-house (and by going back to the photography shop you used prior to the rebranding)? Or would you let it ride and build on your current image?
You can guess what happened right? Against my will, the company hired a creative team. The team was smart and talented, but it had absolutely no experience or understanding on how to sell via the mail. Oh, it thought it knew how to create a catalog that sells — by applying the techniques of general marketing, branding, image building, etc. — but that turned out to be hubris.
You can probably figure out the rest of the story: Sales declined again as customers lost sight of the catalog’s identity after two major design changes in about a year.
The bottom line for this blog posting is very simple. In the catalog business, lightning rarely strikes twice. If you’re lucky enough to successfully fix an ailing catalog design, don’t throw it out and start fresh.
If you have a brand image that works, by all means tweak it. Catalog design changes should be done on an incremental basis. We lucked out with one wholesale redesign, but two, that was pushing it. If you must make large changes to your image, test, test and retest!
Lastly, the best creative team for the job is one that understands mail order.
As the saying goes: “it ain’t creative unless it sells something!”
Speak to you next week.
Jim Gilbert is president of Gilbert Direct Marketing and a professor of direct marketing at Miami International University of Art and Design. He can be reached at jimdirect@aol.com.
Jim Gilbert has had a storied career in direct and digital marketing resulting in a burning desire to tell stories that educate, inform, and inspire marketers to new heights of success.
After years of marketing consulting, Jim decided it was time to “put his money where his mouth was" and build his own e-commerce company, Premo Natural Products, with its flagship product, Premo Guard Bed Bug & Mite Sprays. Premo in its second year is poised to eclipse 100 percent growth.
Jim has been writing for Target Marketing Group since 2006, first on the pages of Catalog Success Magazine, then as the first blogger for its online division. Jim continues to write for Total Retail.
Along the way, Jim has led the Florida Direct Marketing Association as their Marketing Chair and then three-term President, been an Adjunct Professor of Direct and Digital marketing for Miami International University, and created a lecture series, “The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing,” which he has presented across the country at conferences and universities.
