Show Them You Know Them

Customer Loyalty Part 8: Know Your Customer We spend a good deal of our marketing efforts incenting customers to be loyal to us; to be our brand advocates. But doesn’t loyalty go both ways? Don’t we, in turn, need to demonstrate our commitment to our customers? It’s a two-way street, after all—a dialogue. One way […]

Stand Out in a Sea of Sameness

Disrupt. Delight. Drive. Three words that, together, form a mandate for our catalogs. From crowded mailboxes our books need to stand out and garner attention; pay off that attention with content that creates desire, and – ultimately – compel our customers to click, call or visit. It’s a tall order. And that first piece, Disrupt, […]

Five Ways to Mix it Up

Disruptive Catalogs: Part 6 If you’ve been following J.Schmid’s blog posts recently, you’ve already enjoyed reading about the many ways to make your catalog stand out, from show-stopping covers to using devices that invite interaction. But what about rethinking the very construct of your catalog? What about developing a mix-it-up strategy? We know the traditional […]

Catalog Critiques: Making Bad Good, and Good Better

Familial, Authentic Sunnyland Farms If you’ve never had the delicious pleasure of curling up on the couch with a Sunnyland Farms catalog, you’re really missing a treat. Sunnyland Farms is family-owned and started as a mail order company in 1948, providing gourmet Georgia Pecans, Nuts, Chocolates, Dried Fruits, Candies and assorted gifts. Now, they’re online […]

Catalog Critiques: Making Bad Good, and Good Better

Duluth Trading Company It’s my turn to chime in as part of our critique series, where we assess catalogs with an eye for the “Three D’s: DISRUPT, DELIGHT and DRIVE.  Does the catalog stand out and grab my attention (Disrupt)? Does the book engage me somehow (Delight)? Does it encourage me to go online or […]

Knowledge-Based Creative

Part 3: Personalize Your Catalog Covers Big data. Net Promoter Scores. Customer Models. There is a lot of information out there. And if we’re doing our jobs correctly, we’re referencing multiple audience indicators to inform our marketing every step of the way. Especially with digital. We can react quickly to customer behavior; turn on a […]

3 Hidden Truths of Hiring an Outside Agency

Well, it’s (finally) 2021. As we crawl carefully, still masked, out of the shadows of 2020, there is still much unknown. One trend I’m trying to understand is which way the external agency vs. in-house team pendulum will swing. Some suggest that the multilayered crisis that was 2020 now has in-house teams shrinking due to […]

BREAKTHROUGH CREATIVE

Part 5: The Art of the CTA Ah, the ubiquitous—and critical—Call to Action. Great branding, sumptuous, emotional or humorous creative, a strong voice: they are the vessels that hold the CTA. The ask: to buy now; sign-up; get more information; go online; hurry, don’t miss this sale. For every response-driven tactic we create—from catalogs to […]