That’s a bold statement, but one that professor Scott Galloway of New York University’s Stern School of Business is well prepared to defend. And, it appears, with good reason.
Catalogs connect people to your brand in ways and places that other media can’t!
Galloway, one of the brightest minds in marketing and the founder of brand-performance tracking site L2 INC., sees online and offline commerce converging in significant ways. And he’s not alone. Mitch Joel, author of the bestseller Six Pixels of Separation has been blogging about this for at least two years now.
Companies leading this convergence tend most often to come from the traditional bricks & mortar retailing world. Galloway’s favorite example is Macy’s, which has been consistently taking advantage of new technologies and insights to make it’s physical assets more valuable to it’s online business, and vice versa.
Galloway points to Nordstrom as another retailer that’s using both it’s physical presence and it’s online stores in concert to create deeper, sticker relationships with it’s customers than most online-only companies have been able to achieve. He delights in pointing out that both Macy’s and Nordstrom routinely outperform Amazon on shareholder returns.
Their advantage is not size – neither is half as big as Amazon. Rather it’s their local, physical presence that gives them an advantage. That, and both companies excel at true Omnichannel marketing, with strategies that include Print Catalogs as vital components.
Earlier this year Wayfair, the billion-dollar online-only retailer of home furnishings published it’s first-ever Print catalog. But this isn’t Wayfair’s first foray into printed catalogs; both their Birch Lane and DwellStudio brands already publish print catalogs. And that’s the REALLY COOL part… this isn’t just a test. The introduction of a print catalog for the parent brand is validation of the testing they’ve been doing at Birch Lane and DwellStudio, where they’ve clearly discovered that a print catalog helps them to sell more online.
And not just by hawking wares. The selection in the 92-page Wayfair print catalog is tiny compared to what’s available online – just 800 items. But it provides their customers – and would-be customers – with a lasting physical connection to a company without physical stores.
As Joel astutely observes, “our physical spaces have become very digital and our digital lives have very physical and real implications.” And there is magic in connecting those two worlds. “Perhaps the real last mile for all retailers is to own both the physical and digital consumer in one closed-loop.
And the only media channel that can help retailers to effectively close that loop is print. So if you’re selling online, and you’re not already using print to improve your results, give us a call or drop us a note today to talk about print catalogs, and other ways print can help give your online business a physical presence.
Hudson Printing has been helping catalog producers and catalog publishers to make stronger connections with their customers for more than 100 years!
We can help you too! Call us today at (801) 486-4611, or drop us a note at info@hudsonprinting.com
Note: Originally published on LinkedIn at: www.linkedin.com
