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CATALOGUES BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT
CATALOGUES: Back in the spotlight
According to Ofcom, the average Briton now spends more than £2,000 per year online. Tat’s around 70% more than the average American. Last month’s top story in the New York Times was the fact that retail giant JC Penny is bringing back its catalogue, some seven years after it ditched it in face of growing online sales. Te reason – JC Penny has discovered that people need a break in what are now such fast- paced lives. And the catalogue, or more probably, retail branded magazine (or magalogue) provides the ideal chance to influence them during their break.
Te fact that catalogues work hard in driving online sales should not be a surprise to any UK marketer. A quick Google search provides you with enough evidence of their efficacy without having to conduct your own in-depth research programme. A year ago, a survey by MarketReach
found that 60% of consumers visited a retailer’s online store within a week of receiving their catalogue and fully half of these people spent more than £40 on their first purchase. What’s more, those same consumers looked at double the number of web site pages and spent 109% more time online that people who had not received the catalogue. Te same study also showed that 70%
of consumers keep their catalogues for more than a month, with a third keeping them for up to a year. During that time, the average consumer spent between 5 and 30 minutes browsing the catalogue, compared to just 11 minutes browsing the average retail web site. So what is it about catalogues that keeps
consumers engaged and why are they so effective in driving online sales?
Direct Commerce |
www.directcommercemagazine.com
Te answer is specific, not generic.
Catalogues today have little in common with the Yellow Pages style directories that used to be issued by Great Universal Stores, Littlewoods Home Shopping and the like. Other than Argos, there is hardly a retailer that relies on the now out-dated “Big Book” approach to cramming at least one picture of every single product in the range inside a book printed on the cheapest of papers and distributed to everyone on a data file that was out of control. Savvy retailers have learnt from the
magazine industry. (Remember when, a year or so ago, Sainsbury’s marketing director Sarah Warby declared that any retailer not acting as a publisher was missing a trick?). No doubt Next would have said “Yeah, we knew that”. But few other retailers had cottoned on, despite the long term success of the Next Directory. In 2014 the Top 100 print magazines
had a combined circulation of more than 19 million copies, whereas the Top 100 digital editions of magazines had a paltry 514,000 subscribers. While we all know that magazine circulations are falling,
the fact that 19 million people buy them every week, and very few read them online, must tell us something about how consumers want to consume certain types of information. Tink about it. If I want a catalogue
experience, where I can see picture after picture of the brown leather sofa that I’ve decided I want, then online is a great place for me to do research and price comparison. But, and here’s where it gets personal and where the value is driven, if I want to be inspired about how my lounge could look and how much better my life could be as a result, it’s far easier for me to do this in a magazine or a brand/retailer catalogue, where products are much more frequently shown in context and where I have more time to consider what I’m being presented with. What are the trends that I will respond to? Which products actually go with a brown sofa? How would that carpet look with this rug? Which curtains might complement the wallpaper I’ve seen? All these things are better explained in a place where there’s time for reflection, consideration and the absorption of advice, provided by credible experts.
FEATURE
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