Learn From Your Competitors to Keep Ahead

PATIENT: "I'm confused. Is it better to make our catalog look and feel more like our competitors? Or is it a bad idea? Our marketing department is split."

CATALOG DOCTOR: "There are certainly things you can learn from your competitors, so do study them, as well as studying catalogs outside your field. But if you want to maximize sales, it's best to steer clear of copying."

Learn Good Ideas From Competitors, Then Make Them Your Own
Example: "Look, our competitor is showing an illustration of its gift box. That's a great idea. Our gift box is prettier, so let's take a photo of ours and include our nice handwritten gift cards in the photo."

Learn Bad Ideas From Competitors and Steer Clear of Them
Example: "Look at all the sans-serif reverse type our competitor is using. Boy is that hard to read. Let's switch our catalog to a serif font and avoid all reverses. That will make us stand out from this competitor and make our customers’ reading experience faster and easier."

Look Market Appropriate to Your Target Audience
What does it mean to look "market appropriate"? Simply this: if you're selling medical supplies but your catalog has a design that looks like it's targeting snowboarders, you'll probably lose credibility with your target audience. Often most catalogs in a category share a sort of "category look" that distinguishes that category from another (e.g., catalogs for educators look very different from catalogs for fishermen). Yet within a category it's still possible to have a surprisingly wide range of looks work for similar target audiences. Look at how different two long-time catalogs look, Zingermans and La Tienda (see below), though both successfully sell specialty foods to upscale audiences.

Avoid a Loyalty Mix-Up
If you want brand loyalty, you need to make your brand recognizably different from its competition. Sound obvious? It's not. A long-time home goods cataloger had four direct competitors. Over many years its catalog and the four competitors’ catalogs drifted into looking surprisingly similar. The five companies even sold many of the same products and used the same manufacturers’ photos. Oddly, even their catalogs’ names were similar. This particular cataloger's research revealed that many customers bought from it and its competitors. Why?