Print is Dead. Long Live Print.
Despite assumptions to the contrary, the tried-and-true print catalog is gaining new relevance.
The hype about Amazon taking over the world, or at least the world of online retail, is understandable. After all, Amazon’s share of U.S. online retail sales topped more than 40% in 2018. Meanwhile, the multi-year brick and mortar apocalypse continues with more than 7,000 U.S. retail stores set to shutter in 2019.
A backdrop like this might lead one to predict the complete and total doom of carbon-based mediums. However, one such artifact appears to be finding fresh relevance in today’s digital-first environment: the tried-and-true print catalog.
The birth of the U.S. Postal Service ushered in the likes of Sears, Roebuck & Company in the late 1890s. In those days, the printed catalog served not only to generate awareness for the mail-order retailer, but it was also the primary means of browsing and selecting products for purchase. Without the printed catalog, not only would there have been no awareness for the retailer outside of their immediate vicinity, there would have been no store at all.
Today’s catalogs serve a different intent
For purpose-driven brands like Patagonia, the catalog engages deeply on a particular lifestyle that their consumer is passionate about with editorial content they can’t find elsewhere, all the while informing them about related conservation efforts that deliver on the company mission. Product almost appears as an afterthought. Purchase intent becomes a natural outcome of an authentic interest in the subject matter — and what inspiring subject matter it is.
For online furniture brand Wayfair, the catalog does more than build awareness. It helps to fill a touch-and-feel void that’s hard for a strictly online retailer to satisfy. Bob Sherwin, Wayfair’s Head of North American Marketing, says in this Digiday article, “The catalog offers an incredible opportunity to deliver a rich, tactile shopping experience to our customers.”
Bonobos’s catalogs, called “guidebooks,” drive awareness and traffic to the ecommerce website and to brand-owned brick and mortar showrooms — zero-inventory stores that Bonobos calls “guideshops.”
It’s revealing to notice that unlike direct-selling days of yore, Bonobos’s catalogs sometimes lack details like item numbers or available colorways. They often don’t even tell you what product color you’re looking at.
That’s because Bonobos knows that, in the end, the print catalog isn’t where selection is made anymore; it’s merely where the inspiration strikes. The job of the print catalog is to drive their customer to a well-designed, well-supported online channel where much of the buying friction has been removed.
The results can be compelling
Bonobos found that roughly 20% of first-time website customers made a purchase after receiving one of their guidebooks. Furthermore, those customers were found to spend 1.5 times as much as new customers who didn’t receive a guidebook.
U.K. brand Boden learned that its shoppers spend upwards of 15 to 20 minutes with their catalogs versus as few as eight seconds on their emails and just five minutes on the Boden iPad app.
Recent research from the USPS indicates that 84% of consumers have purchased an item after seeing it in a catalog.
One of the more revealing statistics about the future viability of the print catalog is that the more than 78 million “always-on” Gen-Z consumers in the U.S. expect brands to be available at every tap, yet they are more likely to trust printed media for credible information.
Emotional storytelling meets data-driven marketing
As any “old-school” marketer will tell you, one of the great advantages print can have for a brand is control. In a digital-first world where a user’s journey is often asynchronous, dynamic and unpredictable, print offers ultimate control. As long as the person on the other end possesses a minimum requirement of lighting and eyesight, the brand controls the experience.
Print catalogs enable marketers to tell exactly the story they want to tell, exactly how they want to tell it. They can engage the senses in ways that a mobile OS, for example, cannot. The toothiness of the paper, the smell of fresh ink, expansive photography, and carefully-chosen varnishes and die cuts all add up to create a distinct feeling about the brand that’s hard to replicate elsewhere. That’s especially useful for premium or lifestyle brands.
Yet, those advantages aren’t new to marketers. What’s different about today’s print catalogs, as well as other carbon-based mediums, is the sophisticated technology and data that can be deployed behind the scenes to make such efforts more efficient and effective than ever before.
Modern multi-channel marketers have worked hard in recent years to create a single view of customer activity across all channels. So-called “unified master customer records” are used to match online sales back to recent print drops. The frequency by which a customer transacts after being sent a catalog, along with other data like average order value, helps determine whether to send that customer a catalog again in the future or not, thus helping marketers focus their dollars where they are most likely to produce a return.
Such technology and data systems are constantly learning about customer preferences and buying behaviors. With a diverse range of product and lifestyle categories to support, marketers no longer have to be bound by a top-down promotional calendar. For example, instead of a retailer like Recreational Equiment, Inc. guessing that all of its customers are in the market for camping gear just because it’s May, they can categorize customers based on past buying behavior to help them decide who might be more likely to respond to a particular product or category of products.
The printing industry, too, has undergone radical digital transformation that enables ever-complex personalization. While past buying behavior might indicate that you’re more likely to want to upgrade your camping gear in May than you are another warm-weather outdoor sport like kayaking, that doesn’t mean that everyone like you has to receive the same message. Everything from copy to imagery to pricing can be the subject of multivariate testing strategies.
That means that within the same catalog drop, two customers living next door to one another can receive different versions of the same print piece, each one dynamically tailored to their preferences and behaviors.
Not all doom is created equal. More than 9.8 billion catalogs were sent to consumers in 2016, according to the Direct Marketing Association. That’s down from a high of more than 19 billion in 2007. However, what was lost in volume between 2007 and 2016 was perhaps gained in relevance enabled by technology working in the background to help marketers make smarter choices about who, where, when and how to engage.
After all, the best of them know that the consumer is in charge. It’s the difference in the quality and the relevance of the experiences they have with a brand that can make all the difference.
