Catalog marketing continues to be hot right now — and new research from The Harris Poll around holiday shopping helps explain why the channel is so appealing to consumers. In this conversation, Marcus Lancaster, VP, Strategic Accounts at Quad, offers his thoughts on why catalogs are driving both discovery and measurable sales.
Marcus, we wanted to talk to you because you’ve been helping a lot of marketers understand the value and ROI of catalog marketing — and new data points from The Harris Poll definitely feel validating of the channel’s power. For instance, 69% of consumers say catalogs often spark holiday gift ideas they wouldn’t have found online, and 68% say catalog shopping is more relaxing than scrolling online.
Marcus Lancaster: Well, audiences are inundated with emails, social posts, push notifications, all the digital noise — and catalogs provide a moment of respite. There’s a physical aspect to catalogs that is less dismissible than digital.
Let me give you a personal example: Sweetwater is a musical instrument marketer. They sent me a catalog in the mail, and I saw a 12-string acoustic-electric guitar. After seeing it in their catalog, I went to their site and looked at it for a while, but I did not convert. Then they started sending me follow-up emails and serving me programmatic advertising, and every one of those ads had a picture of the exact guitar I’d been looking at. So, their story started with a catalog and ended with me buying the guitar. But in the middle, there was a lot of personalized correspondence.
That is how the purchase journey works really effectively with a catalog. You gain the consumer’s attention, they search, they engage with your brand and then you’re able to remarket to them in an effective manner.
Another example: Amazon is very active in the print catalog space across both fashion and toys. They know audiences are inundated with digital, and a catalog gives them a way to capture their attention. Amazon understands that a catalog is an important component of multichannel marketing to drive people to act. It’s essentially an advertisement for your website in a lot of ways.
The Harris Poll data shows that younger audiences in particular see catalogs as an interactive experience, with nearly half of Gen Z consumers saying that they scan QR codes directly from catalogs. The channel is driving people to act, as you put it.
Marcus Lancaster: Catalog marketing is a fantastic way to do both brand and performance marketing. The feel of a catalog, the way it looks, the quality of the photography, the paper it’s printed on, the products inside — all those things speak to and communicate a huge amount about the brand. And then it’s also a performance vehicle that drives revenue. And it’s measurable, too.
Clearly, it’s working for these brands. They’re tracking the effectiveness of catalogs as a channel and they’re absolutely seeing that it’s worth it to keep sending out catalogs.
Marcus Lancaster: Correct. I’ll use my guitar story again. Frankly, the biggest credit for that sale goes to the catalog. Because had I not received that catalog, I would never have been browsing for the guitar in the first place and so I would never have been keyed up for the programmatic ads that were later served to me.
To come back to measurement, many marketers still use last-click attribution or some kind of variation on that. But what Quad can provide are tools to measure incrementality. A marketer can look at how a subset of people who get the catalog perform versus people who are not getting the catalog — and you can measure the overall sales across those subsets. You’re looking at the performance of cohorts of recipients based upon the media they consume.
So yes, there is direct attribution that you can measure, which includes scanning a QR code in a catalog or inputting a catalog-specific discount code — you know, “Enter HOLIDAY25 for 25% off your order” or whatever, right? Those are things that allow you to trace the purchase back to the catalog. But you also have the ability to measure the incrementality of catalog marketing as a component of a marketer’s holistic media spend.
To come full circle to something you said earlier about catalogs providing “a moment of respite,” in the new Harris Poll research, 51% of consumers say they’ll rely more on catalogs this holiday season to cut down on online scrolling and 64% say catalogs help them narrow down choices faster than shopping online.
Marcus Lancaster: I love that. Catalogs do provide a moment of respite from all the digital noise because they have this presence in terms of the sensory and emotional engagement they offer. In the same way that people of a certain generation grew up excited to receive the Sears catalog or the Spiegel catalog for their holiday shopping, the best marketers are achieving that experience today.
Want to learn more? Download “The Return of Touch Report: Holiday Shopping, Reconnected,” presented by Quad, here (it’s free).
