Print Media's Brand-Building Potential

Although I have been working on increasingly more digital products lately, most of my work has been with print publications. I love holding a magazine or catalog in my hands and turning the pages the old-fashioned way, marking the pages I want to go back to, feeling the paper weight and admiring the quality, while smelling the fresh print. You get the idea. So it makes me sad when folks say to me, “You know, print is dying and it will soon disappear completely.” No, that’s not true!

I love print products and I’m pleased to report that many other consumers do, too. In fact, one of my clients recently conducted a survey and found that 67% of hotel guests read their in-room hotel book during their stay and an impressive 80% enjoy having a printed magazine; it actually contributes to a positive hotel experience.

Print products aren’t just in high demand in the travel and hospitality industries. Retailers are taking notice and investing dollars into print catalogs again.

According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, J.C. Penney’s announcement that it is resurrecting its print catalog reflects a trend of retailers returning to the print medium as an important sales and marketing tool.

Denise Lee Yohn reports that while Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue have been mailing catalogs for years, now specialty retailers are picking up the tactic. Some, like Anthropologie, are launching new catalogs, while J. Crew and Restoration Hardware have significantly upgraded their catalogs in the past couple of years. 

Here’s some more of the HBR article, “Why the Print Catalog Is Back in Style.”

Given the new dynamics of multichannel marketing and commerce, as well as the new targeting and measurement capabilities of catalog marketing, it appears that catalogs will be around for a while.

Multi-channel shopping and buying is on the rise, and retailers know that customers who use more than one of their channels are usually the most valuable. In fact, Nordstrom reports that customers who have a multi-channel relationship with the brand spend FOUR times as much as those who do not. 

Catalogs are also uniquely designed to help marketing departments fulfill their objectives. Marketers are increasingly challenged to produce a specific return on investment for their efforts. The effect of a broadcast spot or social media campaign on sales may be hard to pin down, but catalogs — with their definitive mail dates and customer and source codes — are easier to track. Targeting with catalogs is also much easier now, thanks to huge industry databases containing all sorts of information on millions of households. And thanks to online purchasing, many retailers have amassed their own customer databases that can be synced up with them. This combination gets the right catalogs into the right hands.

What’s more, new production and printing capabilities in print media have taken the cost and complexity out of versioning — the industry term for tailoring different versions of a catalog to different customer segments. Outdoor and apparel retailer L.L. Bean says it is experimenting with the page count of the catalogs it sends to regular website shoppers. Steve Fuller, chief marketing officer, explains that instead of sending every customer his brand’s largest book, he looks for frequent website visitors and asks, “Can I only send her 50 pages, or 20, as a reminder of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go to the website’?”

Retailers have also discovered that catalogs can be used for high quality content marketing. High-touch print pieces filled with stories, fashion show images, profiles of celebrity endorsers and designers, and room layouts have proven to be excellent ways to convey a brand ethos and express a brand personality. For instance, Williams Sonoma has started including recipes in its catalogs, next to the products consumers need to cook them. And Restoration Hardware has elevated brand-building through catalogs to an art form. Its 2014 annual catalog was actually comprised of up to 13 “sourcebooks” with more than 3,300 pages of luxurious photography, profiles of designers and craftsmen, inspirational stories — and yes, products for sale. The extravagant catalog is part of the company’s effort of “becoming a brand worthy of loving,” as chairman and CEO Gary Friedman explains. “We believe what we are doing is moving beyond an intellectual connection to an emotional one. We are beginning to express those things we deeply believe in a way you can see it.”

The need to engage customers at this higher level is unlikely to go away even if the economy takes another turn downward. In fact, as more products become more similar and as the Internet continues to provide increasing access to more products, print catalogs and their content will grow as means to differentiate brands and sustain existing customer relationships. Great brands integrate catalogs with email marketing, social media, and other tactics into a distinctive, memorable, and valuable brand experience for their customers.

Catalogs may seem old school, but their increased capabilities and the brand-building potential suggest they’ll remain a staple in retailers’ toolboxes – and consumers’ mailboxes.