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In the United States, a mature market is the major blockade to finding new names, whereas overseas the challenge is not only finding lists but getting permission to mail to them. Business publication lists, says Stephen Eustace, team leader, international brokerage, at Acxiom/Direct Media in Greenwich, CT, are very good sources of names. The Business Week list, for example, gets used frequently, because 50 percent to 60 percent of the file includes home addresses, an optimal situation for mailing both consumer and business offers. What if you don't want to live by publication lists alone? You'll probably have to go off the beaten

The underlying philosophy of Omaha Steaks’ successsful telemarketing operation is: “I don’t have the right to determine when you’re done buying.” And that’s a good way to look at upselling on the phone. Instead of thinking of it as pushing extra product at your customers, present it as a customer service, suggests Ron Bruggeman, director of sales at Omaha Steaks International, a cataloger and direct marketer that operates its own call center. For inbound telemarketing operations, Bruggeman says that means almost every caller is a prospect. He explains, “It makes sense: You have a captive audience of people who

Many catalogers, especially smaller and medium-sized ones, are seriously challenged when it comes to developing a stronger revenue and profit stream from their customer lists. The following challenges are endemic to all catalogers in working their customer lists: Knowing which are the best customers (i.e., the ones with the highest lifetime value (LTV) and those most likely to respond to the next mailing); Knowing how to build customer loyalty without having to buy it with discounts, premiums or extensive (and expensive) point programs; Knowing when and how to reactivate those once-loyal customers who you haven’t heard from in some time; Knowing how to

"Necessity is the mother of invention." —William Wycherley (1671). By Denny Hatch PEOPLE WHO TRAVEL need stuff—a tiny screwdriver with tiny screws to fix eyeglasses, a bottle opener, tweezers for splinters, a sewing kit, sunburn skin cream, a poncho, laxative, Imodium A-D—you know the drill. Ever tried to open a wine bottle without a corkscrew? For Tim Leatherman, the epiphany came on his European honeymoon in 1975 where he had to deal with a very temperamental '68 Fiat he'd bought for $300. In an interview with USA Today, Leatherman said, "All I had was this Boy Scout knife, which we

When Mammoth Sports Group purchased the Austad’s golf catalog from Hanover Direct this past October, it became “a new company under new ownership with a new mission,” says Kent Arett, president of Mammoth Sports Group located in Jessup, MD. “We knew there was a lot of potential there that was not being tapped. This was an underperforming business. That was the whole reason we bought it [Austad’s],” Arett explains. Under terms of the agreement, Mammoth Sports Group, which also owns several Mammoth Golf superstores and an e-commerce site, purchased Austad’s complete inventory, customer base and historical artwork with plans to quickly ramp up the

Cataloging is not a beauty contest. Catalogers are in business to make money, so it’s not always the prettiest catalog that gets the best response or sells the most merchandise. While an aesthetically pleasing catalog works for apparel and home furnishing offerings, for some types of merchandise, a less pretty, more product-dense approach works better. The Damark catalog, featuring electronics and computers, is one such example. Damark focuses on product and price. It uses inexpensive paper instead of thick coated paper. It includes simple product shots instead of fancy spreads. It utilizes short, benefit-driven copy instead of long-winded, story copy. And it works:

by Jack Schmid In the folklore of catalog history, there is a story that may be apocryphal, but fascinating just the same. It's a story of Harry and David, today's leader in the food-by-mail field. In the height of the great depression, Harry and David's fruit business faced impending doom. In a last ditch attempt to save the company, the owners presented their fruit baskets to businesses as a gift idea. The idea worked and the story goes that it not only saved the company from ruin, but helped focus Harry and David on a new course—mail order and cataloging to businesses and consumers.

As 1998's holiday season approached, a record number of retailers sought revenue from Internet sales in addition to their concrete storefronts. But Web-based selling is not yet the golden child of the industry. It still requires a helping hand from other media to ensure that customers can find your site in the massive volume of Web pages. One way to attract attention to your site: Print a catalog. Every November, print catalogs fight for visibility in the holiday shopper's mailbox. In 1998, two companies upped the ante by being different: the Dell Home Systems Catalog and barnesandnoble.com got shoppers off the phone and onto

Digital photography is maturing into its own image capture specialty. but novice beware: to succeed, you need to do more than just point and shoot. Photographs are the principal marketing tools of the retail catalog. The better the quality of the photograph—that is, its ability to express adequately the details and essence of the item—the higher the chance of customer satisfaction. Achieving enticing product shots traditionally requires a multi-step process, which includes: initial, instant film shots to test composition and lighting; the actual photo shoot; sending the film for development; waiting; checking the transparencies for accuracy; then re-shooting or digitally manipulating anything that comes

Business-to-business Mega-Cataloger Viking Office Products Thinks Locally Across a Vast Global Workflow Founded in 1960, Viking Office Products is legendary for its customer service. But as the Torrance, CA-company expands into more and more countries around the world, another remarkable story is taking shape: International business done with the local culture in mind. For the challenge of keeping the Viking brand intact across national boundaries, and in spite of cultural differences, streamlined asset management and workflow are a major aid. Prior to Viking's merger with Office Depot, sales in fiscal 1998 were approximately $1.5 billion, all through mail order. Viking's annual sales are

About this time nine years ago I was getting set to be married, so I registered my china and crystal patterns with a Big Department Store’s bridal registry. Then, a funny thing happened: I started receiving boxes at my home from someplace called Ross-Simons. “What store is this?” I asked my mother, for while it carried the precise gifts I had selected, I had neither been there nor heard of it. “It’s not a store. It’s a catalog,” she replied. More recently, in the fall of 1997 my sister was wed. For her bridal registry, she chose to skip the Big Department

Finding your best customers with the right kinds of data The tumultuous growth of the Internet has shown that catalogers that traditionally relied solely on print media now have new ways of reaching customers and prospects. However, anything new requires some degree of change: The world of the Web caters to customers' whims and offers to satisfy those desires on demand. That means now is the time for catalog companies to get sophisticated about what they sell and to whom. Can you leverage the information in your database to provide customers with more of the products they want at the right times? What about

Watermark The Catalogue of the RNLI The catalog selected for this issue's look at unique positioning and creative breakthrough is Watermark: The Catalogue of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). This catalogue was recently selected as one of the category winners at the 1998 European Catalogue & Mail Order Day's (ECMOD98) first Catalogue Awards. To the judges, this was one of the most well-conceived and best executed catalogues of the show, a unique honor for a not-for-profit, fundraising catalogue. Other than those for museums, successful not-for-profit catalogs are scarce in the United States. The RNLI catalogue shows us how it's done, with

At the turn of the 17th century, Italian inventor Galileo Galilei discovered that a change in temperature affects the buoyancy of liquid, giving rise to the invention of a crude thermometer. Fast forward about 400 years, and Galileo's "thermoscope" is now available to the masses, sold as a work of art and science to grace our homes and offices. Today's version consists of a clear glass cylinder, filled with a clear, temperature-sensitive liquid and glass globes filled with colored liquids, each with a numbered tag to display the temperature. Galileo's thermometer is difficult to describe, let alone image, in a catalog. Following,

One of the major challenges faced by catalogers is building the customer or buyer file. There is a lot of misunderstanding on how important this process is. For example: • Start-up catalogers are impatient and want to make money in the first year or at the latest, the second year. But they haven't built a buyer list of any size. • Many veteran catalogers do a poor job of measuring what it costs to get a customer and prioritizing the various lists and outside media used in prospecting. • Few catalogs measure the lifetime value (LTV) of their buyers (by media) that can

When Peter and Peggy Rice founded the Plow & Hearth catalog in an outbuilding on their Virginia farm in 1981, their inspiration was the back-to-basics movement. Nearly 20 years later, the country philosophy remains, but the back-roads mail order business is anything but backwards. Its adoption of a high-tech database in the mid '90s has led to quick, efficient growth through sophisticated modeling, which in turn engendered a home-furnishings catalog spin-off and a highly successful upselling program. Now Plow & Hearth's dual commitment to direct marketing basics and use of cutting-edge technology is allowing the founders to reap what they've sown. In April

by Jack Schmid THE BIG IDEA! What direct marketer has not dreamed of coming up with that totally unique, breakthrough concept like the "Johnson Box" or the negative option club or another creative ploy that gives one immortality in industry recognition. Whether you're a designer, photographer, writer, printer or order form manufacturer, everyone is seeking that special creative technique that will help their work stand out, differentiate themselves from the competition and get better results. "Beat the Control!" is the cry of creative professionals. Let's look at a number of ways that successful catalogers are thinking "outside the box" in their creative efforts.

Think about this: The Direct Marketing Association estimates the average household receives 1.7 catalogs per week. The direct marketing shopper is probably not in your average household, so that number jumps dramatically for the direct mail-responsive. Now consider that there are roughly 100 million households in the United States. At the rate of 1.7 catalogs a week, it's safe to say the average consumer mailbox receives 88.4 books per year for an annual 8.84 billion in circulation. From a marketer's point of view, explains Susan McIntyre, president of McIntyre Direct, if you're sending out 20 catalogs a year, you'll need to do something

by Jack Schmid One of the classic questions that catalog creative managers face is how to manage their creative dollars and resources most effectively and productively. Small and medium-sized catalogs tend to outsource much of their creative effort and concentrate on the merchandising and marketing aspects of their business. Larger catalog companies typically develop their creative team inside because they know that they will produce six or eight or 10 books during the year and it's more productive and less expensive to own their staff and facilities. Even large catalogers, however, find occasions when they outsource certain projects or tasks to creative

by Jack Schmid What do all the following situations have in common? • You're launching a new catalog. • You're spinning off a catalog from an existing product line. • Your catalog design is flat, tired and you're re-thinking the look of the entire book. • You're considering adding an extra mailing to the season and want it to really stand out. Every one of these examples must deal with a common question: What's the size and shape (or format) of the new book going to be? Catalog format is often taken for granted. It is typically established by a previous creative team or