A Mistake

BigO Tires is using their SMS-based CRM system.

Not mentioned here is they provided an oil change a half-year ago and they replaced a tire sensor about nine months ago.

So ... two points for their brand using a SMS-based CRM system. Odds are likely you aren't doing this.

But if you are going to wander down this path ... get it right.

I know many of you get frustrated when I say something about Headphones.com (somebody emailed me last week to tell me how I got their story "all wrong" ... thanks for the feedback), but when I log in to their community forum and look at a specific topic, they send me an email about products related to that topic.

• Their feedback is based on my actions in-between purchases, their action is relevant and immediate.
• BigO Tires sends a CRM-based message not connected to purchases or actions, and contains inaccurate data.

My industry is kind of lost right now ... and we wonder why we retain 25% of customers when we could retain 35% of customers??

Middle of the Funnel

A CEO mentioned something on the phone earlier today about "middle of the funnel" activity, and I thought he made a really bright insight.

More on that in a moment.

Back in the stone ages (2005 - Nordstrom) our brilliant IT support team (who reported to the Credit Division) built us a process to identify every visitor on our website. We recorded information about every single visit, and if the customer purchased, the email address was linked to every single visit, allowing us to tailor/target/personalize any offline marketing activities because we linked purchases to visits.

We also learned what we called the "3-2-1" rule ... the customer generally visited three times a month, carted merchandise twice a month, and purchased once a month (with 3/4th of those purchases happening ... in a store ... which our crack IT staff linked back to the website visits via integration of our point-of-sale system and our e-commerce system).

Show of hands ... how many of you are doing all of that today? In other words, if a customer who hasn't purchased in twenty-seven months all of a sudden ends up on your website, how many of you have programs in place to immediately communicate with that customer?

The simple act of recognizing a customer ... that's a middle-of-the-funnel activity.

Since 2005, we've become GREAT at bottom-of-the-funnel activity.

Since 2005, we've become mediocre at middle-of-the-funnel activity.

And since 2005, we've become horrible at top-of-the-funnel activity. It's all been eliminated from the marketing mix, viewed as "waste". Turns out it isn't "waste", is it? It's the activity that trickles down to the rest of the business.

I recall an author telling me pre-COVID that it was all of the waste from top-of-the-funnel activity that led to good middle-of-the-funnel activity which ultimately led to high ROAS bottom-of-the-funnel activity. I've never forgotten his thesis.

As we head toward 2025, we're going to give top/middle-of-the-funnel activities more scrutiny. We "have" to do this, don't you think?

The Triumphant Return of Physical Catalogs

The folks on LinkedIn sure enjoyed this (click here).

You tell me ... is the Advertising Specialty Institute right? On their Wikipedia page (click here), it says, and I quote, "ASI's main business is organizing and classifying suppliers' products in catalogs."

What do you think of what they wrote?

Another Reader Question

Here we go:

• "Is there more to what is happening across e-commerce than what you are talking about? In other words, it just seems like marketing is under pressure right now. Would you agree that marketing tactics are under pressure right now?"

Yeah. I would agree.

What's changing, of course, is "how" we communicate with customers.

We've learned three things post-COVID.

1. E-commerce brands are too focused on "bottom-of-the-funnel" tactics. The relationship in-between purchases is quite limited, and needs to be expanded.
2. Expensive "bottom-of-the-funnel" tactics are being ruthlessly eliminated by reduced response in the post-COVID era paired with overwhelming competition from Amazon.
3. We don't know how to communicate at the "top-of-the-funnel", especially now that old-school methods like television (outside of sports) are largely limited to a 50-85 year old customer.

Allow me to use eBay as an example. They are great at communicating with me when I've looked at a headphone or a dac/amp combo. They thrive at the bottom-of-the-funnel. They also have no clue whatsoever at how to keep me interested in-between purchased. They know exactly what I've looked at, they know what I've purchased, and they know what I've sold. They appear to use virtually none of that information in the months in-between purchases ... just a complete failure of top-of-the-funnel activities.

So yes, marketing tactics are under pressure right now. Anything too expensive at the bottom-of-the-funnel is being ruthlessly eliminated (ask Orvis). And too few e-commerce companies know how to keep a customer or prospect interested in-between purchases. Having a million followers on Instagram is easy. Having a compelling story to tell customers between purchases is hard.

The Phoenix Zoo

Another Question:  We plan our entire marketing calendar around the catalog. What do you expect us to do on October 28 when we don't have a catalog in-home that day, or for any day for the rest of the year?

Catalog brands sometimes had weaker-than-average marketers, because historically the catalog "was" the marketing vehicle, with the misguided omnichannel thesis requiring that all other marketing channels support catalog in-home events. The catalog in-home was "the" event. Without a catalog ... you'll need to create reasons for customers to spend money with you. 

You need to create something out of nothing.

How many of you have visited a zoo at night? It's not like you get to spend time looking at a giraffe at 8:35pm ... that's a daylight event. And yet, the zoo is sitting there ... available ... after dark. It "could" be utilized in some way.

The Phoenix Zoo is famous for their ZooLights Program ... especially at Christmas (click here). I realize you don't think a 50 degree evening in December is cold, but in the desert after you've acclimated to 115 degree temperatures, 50 degree evenings in December are VERY cold. And yet, the locals flock to the Zoo, at night, in the cold, to look at the lights.

It's not only at Christmas, by the way. They schedule events in late October as well, like earlier this week.

In my case, it was a group of six of us who went to see the butterfly display, then we spent $$$ on dinner at the restaurant at the Zoo (named Gertrude's, where hundreds were dining, most outside on an 88 degree evening in late October), followed by walking the grounds looking at the light display, called "Light Bloom".

I mean, there's no reason to visit a Zoo at night ... and yet, somehow, the Phoenix Zoo was teeming with people who spent money to be there on a perfect October evening.

They have plenty of events (click here).

They are hustling.

You, too, will be hustling when the catalog no longer exists.

Can you imagine the fun you're going to have creating events from scratch?

P.S.:  This applies to you in the e-commerce world as well. Instead of "60% OFF TODAY ONLY" followed by "60% OFF TODAY ONLY" again next Friday, why not create real events that customers want to be part of?

P.P.S.:  Another question from a reader ... "Is there an industry that does events well?"  I'd volunteer the wine industry. They create events and on-site tastings and video-tastings, the build excitement for their 2021 Pinot Noir release, they have wine clubs (i.e. subscriptions) where they get you to spend $600 a pop, they're quite good at what they do as an industry. Look at what wineries do for events, ok?

Another Question: Merchandise

Thank you for your questions and feedback ... a lot to keep track of in the inbox these days.

Question:  You suggest that catalogs cause different merchandise to sell. We've been taught for two decades to approach our merchandising strategy the same way across all marketing channels. We've been told this is a best practice. Why would you tell us otherwise?

I'm not suggesting catalogs cause different merchandise to sell. I'm tell you that ALL MARKETING CHANNELS align with a portion of your merchandise assortment. ALL CHANNELS have unique customers with unique merchandise preferences.

• The products that sell via email marketing are usually different (and less expensive).
• The products that sell via PLAs are usually different.
• The products that sell via search are usually different.
• The products that sell via paid social are usually different.
• The products that sell via print/catalogs are usually different.
• The products that sell in stores are often very different than those that sell online.
• The products that sell via direct load are different than the products selling via marketing.

You may not think this is a big deal, and sometimes you'd be right. It becomes a big deal when you want to end something.

Example:  Say you offer your best discounts via email marketing, and now you have a new CEO and the new CEO says "no more 60% off, the biggest discount is 30% off going forward". Well, that might sound good on the surface, but next week you offer 30% off and the 60% off customer who likes $200 items for $120 says "nope, won't buy" ... and later that week your merchandising team notices that $200 items aren't selling well, and two weeks later inventory is starting to pile up only on expensive items and they have no idea why, so they decide that they need to offer discounts on expensive items in all channels. Fun!

Example:  The Google-centric shopper buys inexpensive items. You decide that you are going to focus your remaining print efforts only on best-selling items to protect the productivity of print. This means the items the Google-centric shopper buys aren't featured in your 56 page mini-catalog. The handful of Google-centric shoppers you've acquired who like print won't respond now because you aren't featuring the stuff that the Google-centric customer likes. This makes catalog performance look bad, and causes Management to say "well, smaller page counts don't work".

Most of what you've been taught about channels and merchandise is wrong. Every channel has a unique product assortment ... some items that work great in all channels ... some items that work great in one channel. It's your job to tailor the product to channels based on prior performance and the customers who are likely to shop those channels going forward. If you're having problems with this concept, contact me (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and we'll get busy.

Ending A Catalog: A Simple One-Year Forecast

There are two important metrics that must be satisfied if you want to consider not mailing catalogs anymore.

1. Your organic percentage, via mail/holdout tests, must exceed 50% at minimum.
2. The fraction of new customers you generate (annually) via catalog marketing must be < 20%.

The new customer percentage is really important.

Let's just look one year in advance. Pretend you retain 30% of 100,000 twelve-month buyers, year-over-year, spending $200 each. Pretend you generate 70,000 new/reactivated buyers, spending $120 each.

• Existing Buyers:  100,000 * 0.30 * $200 = $6,000,000.
• New/Reactivated Buyers:  70,000 * $120 = $8,400,000.
• This Year = $14,400,000 Demand.
• Next Year = 100,000 * 0.30 + 70,000 = 100,000 Twelve-Month Buyers.

Ok, let's assume that just 20% of new/reactivated customers come in via print. Let's also assume that your organic percentage among twelve-month buyers is 80%, meaning if you don't mail catalogs, 80% of the volume remains.

• Existing Buyers:  100,000 * (0.30*0.80) * $200 = $4,800,000.
• New/Reactivated Buyers:  70,000*0.80 * $120 = $6,720,000.
• This Year = $11,520,000 Demand.
• Next Year = 100,000 * (0.30*0.80) + 70,000*(0.80) = 80,000 Twelve-Month Buyers.

In other words, about 20% of your business disappears. If you play that out over five years, maybe 30% of the business disappears in total. But you might be much more profitable (or you wouldn't be considering this concept).

Now let's assume that 50% of demand is organic, and let's assume that 50% of new/reactivated customers are generated via catalogs. The math is ... different.

• Existing Buyers:  100,000 * (0.30*0.50) * $200 = $3,000,000.
• New/Reactivated Buyers:  70,000*0.50 * $120 = $4,200,000.
• This Year = $7,200,000 Demand.
• Next Year = 100,000 * (0.30*0.50) + 70,000*(0.50) = 50,000 Twelve-Month Buyers.

To recap:

• Business As-Is = $14,400,000. 
• Good Metrics = $11,520,000.
• Catalog-Dependent Metrics = $7,200,000.

I could play this out for five years, but there's no reason to. Let's assume a 40% flow-through to profit and $3,000,000 in annual catalog expense.

• Business As-Is = $14,400,000*0.40 - $3,000,000 = $2,760,000 variable profit.
• Good Metrics = $11,520,000*0.40 - $0 = $4,608,000 variable profit.
• Catalog-Dependent Metrics = $7,200,000*0.40 - $0 = $2,880,000 variable profit.

The majority of catalog professionals reading this DO NOT WANT to manage a $7.2 million dollar brand that is more profitable than a $14.4 million dollar brand. I know this to be true, because you tell me you do not want your business to be half the size it is today at the same level of profitability.

The majority of owners, however, DO WANT to manage an $11.5 million dollar brand that is wildly more profitable than a $14.4 million dollar brand with catalogs.

This, quite honestly, is the math you need to perform. As long as you have mail/holdout tests, you can perform this math. It's easy!!

If you want me to take a shot at it, I'll produce a five-year guesstimate of where your brand would go without catalogs for just $9,900. Contact me now (kevinh@minethatdata.com) and I'll produce a forecast for you, ok??!!

More Questions

Lots of feedback these past two weeks.

• "Kevin, how can you defend mailing fewer catalogs or no catalogs at all when each incremental contact has intangible benefits that cannot be easily quantified by response and profit? How can you possibly know how much harm you are doing long-term by cutting out print?"

Yeah, I hear that often ... I've heard it more often in the past week. The question almost always surfaces from 60+ year old professionals and/or paper/agency professionals.

Let's start here. This is a recent Apple commercial on television. Tell me what the intangible benefit of the commercial is ... I'll wait while you watch it.

You've had since 2008 to decide if you are in the iOS camp or if you are in the Android camp. Demonstrating that iOS is good at AI is pointless ... you either are in the iOS camp and you already use Siri or you are in the Android camp. How many Android users see this commercial on linear television (a medium dominated by 50+ year olds at ever-decreasing rates) and say "That's it, that's the thing that causes me to change!" How many?

You can make a strong argument that the commercial series will not increase sales. Which means the commercial falls into the "intangible benefits" category. Professionals use the term "intangible benefits" to defend a craft that appears unprofitable via most metrics.

None of us know if we are doing long-term damage by cutting out a marketing channel. Heck, we could just as easily turn that argument around and ask the following question:

• "How much long-term damage are we doing to a brand by maintaining a marketing channel with poor ROI when we could/should reallocate those funds to modern marketing channels that attract a different audience?"

In other words, what are the long-term intangible benefits of modernizing marketing efforts?

Look, I know it is painful to spend your entire career doing something you love, only to have that craft lose effectiveness at the very time the paper/printing community decides to charge more and constrain supply, accelerating the demise.  

I have a friend who is a sports writer ... not many people want to pay to read sports content anymore. He provides considerable intangible benefits via his experience and perspective, but the customer does not value those benefits ... they'd rather hear a 23 year old offer less-informed opinions on a podcast. Hence, the intangible benefits have no value.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about the long-term perspective of not having catalogs anymore. It's an interesting topic, one many readers will have to grapple with.

Email Marketing Becomes Really, Really Important

E-commerce brands typically generate 25% to 40% of their annual volume via email marketing. That daily relationship they have with the customer is so darn important. They "have" to collect that email address and not abuse the relationship.

The catalog brand considering getting away from catalogs has a reckless relationship with email marketing. Because they can market via name/address, and each of those contacts generates $4.00 per mailing while each email message generates $0.08 per mailing, the relationship skews heavily toward print. So what if the customer opts out of email marketing? As a result, it's not uncommon for the catalog brand to generate 5% or less of annual sales from email marketing.

If you are thinking of closing the books on print, you build an email marketing plan at least one year ahead of the day catalogs end. You need to meet the needs of customers who are used to shopping a large assortment - and you need to figure that out with a format that encourages the shopping of a small number of items.

In other words, if you have five email marketing messages per week, each workday has to offer a different theme. You need to feature new items, you need to feature best sellers / winners, you need to liquidate the stuff that doesn't sell, you need to align with natural sale events and fake holidays (Cyber Monday) and actual holidays.

Making it harder ... you'll need to have different campaigns/cadences for different audiences.

• Welcome Programs for new buyers in the first three months of their experience with you.
• Separate Marketing Programs for Twelve-Month Buyers.
• Elite Buyers (75%+ Annual Rebuy Rate).
• Loyal Buyers (60% - 74% Annual Rebuy Rate).
• Quality Buyers (40% - 59% Annual Rebuy Rate).
• Average Buyers (20% - 39% Annual Rebuy Rate).
• Struggling Buyers (0% - 19% Annual Rebuy Rate).
• Separate Marketing Programs for Lapsed Buyers.
• Those you should spend money on.
• Those you should experiment with.
  
• Those who are highly unproductive (i.e. don't spend money with these buyers).

This is where a fraction of the audience says "nah, that's too much work".

• Your brand sends fourteen catalogs with 48 spreads per catalog ... creating 672 spreads per year featuring 4-12 items per spread.
• Apply those resources to email marketing.

If you're going to end the catalog, you have to "begin something". Begin anew with old-school email marketing ... you're going to have to begin anew with a lot of marketing disciplines, why not start with one you have aptitude for? Start a year ahead of time, learn, adjust, and then be ready when change comes.

A Question From A Reader About Shutting Down A Catalog Division

I've received a lot of emails and comments in the past week from readers. Most of the feedback follows a handful of themes.

• Service Providers:  Orvis might not understand the intangible, unmeasurable value of print.
• Catalog Professionals:  This day has been coming for a long time. You should see the internal conversations we've been having the past two years.

Here was one particularly pointed paragraph.

• "I'll believe in you if you name one, just one cataloger who successfully pivoted from print to e-commerce. I await your response."

Now, I have several clients where I am under NDA, and those clients successfully pivoted over the past ten years. I can't go into those cases for obvious reasons.

But I can tell you all about 19 years ago when I worked at Nordstrom and we ended a $160,000,000 catalog business (yeah, that business was bigger than almost all of the businesses that catalog professionals reading this text manage).

The debate about the "catalog" was vibrant and active when I arrived at Nordstrom in January 2001. The merchandise offered in the catalog sold via print ... it was not the fashion-centric product that worked well in stores and online. It should surprise nobody that if you try to grow a catalog brand, you pursue what works in catalogs and not what works in an "omnichannel" environment. It's suicide to sell the same stuff in all channels ... each channel has specific customers with specific preferences, you maximize ROI by catering to the customer who prefers a channel.

By 2003, what "worked" in a catalog was fundamentally different than what worked online, and what worked online was a "cousin" to what worked in stores. Online/Stores were more closely aligned, but catalog merchandise was very different, and it was obvious that merchandise served a different customer. If we tried to align the merchandise in print with stores/online, the catalog failed. If we catered to the catalog customer, the product offering was so different that it didn't really reflect "the brand".

It was obvious something had to be done.

In 2003-2004, we studied the profitability of the catalog channel. We ignored the lousy logic of matchback analytics, instead relying upon A/B holdout tests. We already knew that half of the demand would still exist if we didn't mail catalogs, and we already knew that the organic percentage (50%) was increasing over time. We were left with $160,000,000 in sales (approximately) and $36,000,000 in ad cost. With around 35% of sales flowing through to profit and about $15,000,000 in fixed costs, the catalog generated maybe $5,000,000 in incremental profit ... we assumed the catalog was essentially a break-even proposition.

Which meant the catalog didn't need to exist.

Oh, the internal discussions.

Imagine being the VP of Inventory for the catalog/online division. Inventory professionals don't have mail/holdout results, they just know that if the catalog is mailed you sell 10,000 widgets, they don't get to see how many widgets will be sold if you don't mail a catalog, to them the number is zero. The inventory folks were generally frustrated, and for good reason. They didn't believe the math we published, and I can't blame them for not believing in the math in 2004. In 2024? It's a different world.

I had 24 professionals reporting to me. It became obvious I'd only need 12-15 people if the catalog didn't exist. For one full year, I had to develop a plan for moving forward with a smaller team. The same reality hit inventory management, creative, and our merchandising team.

Merchandising changes were particularly painful, because the retail side of the business was going to "win" and the catalog professionals were going to "lose". Those who stayed would lose power, others would lose their jobs. Not surprisingly, some of the retail folks and online gloated at the expense of the catalog professionals. Humans.

Publicly traded companies do not like to see sales declines. We had to come up with a way to protect the top line. We had $36,000,000 of ad cost that could be reallocated. The online marketing executive and I worked together, and realized a decent chunk of that money could be spent digitally (mostly via non-branded paid search). Eighteen million dollars would be reallocated to search. The rest of the money was reallocated to what I'd loosely call "the retail packaging experience". Yeah, bags. Somehow the paper people always get their money.

We worked for about a year to determine the viability of the catalog - we then spent a year communicating our change in strategy to employees while working to align resources (i.e. downsizing) with the business that remained.

I've had better years, professionally.

I recall one particularly pointed phone call with a trade journalist ... an individual who began the phone call with the phrase "are you the dumbest person in the industry"? The person didn't publish any of my defense ... the trade journalist just ran with the "fact" we were stupid people and didn't understand the value of catalog marketing in an omnichannel world.

We mailed our last catalog two years after initiating discussions about the viability of the catalog.

We had an online + catalog business that generated maybe $400,000,000 in sales. Pull $160,000,000 in catalog sales out, and the online business should have contracted to $240,000,000, then grown by 25% +/- as was the case back in the day, headed back to $300,000,000. The numbers here (outside of the $160,000,000 for catalog) are marginally fuzzy due to memory, but are in the ballpark. I do remember that we ended the year after discontinuing the catalog with a 4% direct-channel sales decrease, meaning we were around $385,000,000 in sales.

In other words, killing the catalog while reallocating money to digital and aligning the merchandise with the retail channel was a very good decision. The online channel began to grow in an unfettered manner, albeit via a different merchandise assortment. This is why you hear me harp about understanding merchandise if you operate with multiple channels generating a significant minority of sales. It's why you hear me plead with you to understand what PLAs do to your business over time, or to understand what Amazon does to your business over time.

The merchandise assortment: About two months after our final catalog mailing, I started receiving phone calls from 60-74 year old women in the Dakotas, in Minnesota, in Michigan, in Vermont, in New Hampshire, in Maine, in Upstate New York, in Idaho. Rural areas. Angry calls. Frustrated calls. These people wanted to know why they were no longer receiving catalogs? They wanted to know what happened to the merchandise they loved, given the merchandise was no longer available on the website. I politely explained over and over and over again that we were no longer mailing catalogs and the products they loved were discontinued. This customer angrily explained over and over and over again why it was a disgrace that we were no longer serving her.

I recall sharing those conversations with my boss. My boss would listen politely, then say "I don't care". I'd respond "How can you not care?". She'd reply "That customer is not our core customer. Our core customer is a 30-50 year old shopper who lives within 25 miles of a store. That's the customer I care about."

Culturally, the composition of the work force changed. Brain drain. The operations executive left. The inventory executive left. The online executive was passed over for promotion to President and left. The President left, replaced by a member of the Nordstrom family. Merchants left. Creative professionals left, some starting their own businesses. My list manager left. My circulation manager left. My forecast manager moved over to the online division. My circulation director moved over to the online division. I didn't have to downsize many people because most saw the writing on the wall and left in advance of the decision.

The brain drain was interesting, because the "brains" that left repeatedly talked about how the business would suffer without their insights and brilliance.

A year later, I walked into the President's office, and told a member of the Nordstrom family that I was proud of him and his team for handling the transition so gracefully. Sales were increasing by 25% per month, profit was at an all-time high, and the people managing the new digital/retail online channel were doing great work. Nobody is as important to a company as they think they are.

Me included.

Eighteen months after the catalog was terminated, my job was greatly "reduced" in scope, in a decision that was clearly made to get me to move on with my life without having to pay severance. I was no longer needed, for obvious reasons. The business was healthy, the people running it were excellent, the job was done.

Since I knew what was coming, I spent my last two years at Nordstrom writing two books, published by the late Don Libey. He showed me how to run a consulting business, and by publishing the books I generated the "community" I needed when I started my business. In early 2006, I began writing this blog ... by March 2007 I had a thousand subscribers. When I announced to readers that I was starting my own business, I had immediate inquiries, and within five days I booked a $40,000 project.

You shouldn't shut down a catalog division without spending about two years preparing the business for the shock that comes without having print. Meeting structures change ... you don't meet because of the August Remail Catalog ... aligning digital activities to support the remail ... you meet because you have to find a way to grow sales in August ... what is the event you'll create to generate sales in August? You prepare ahead of time for the day when your Inventory Executive leaves, or your Chief Merchant leaves, or your CRM Director leaves. Professionally, you prepare ahead of time for what your next job will look like.

I could go on and on, but that wouldn't be a good use of your time.

But yes, I know a little something about somebody who shut down a catalog division successfully. Send me an email (kevinh@minethatdata.com) with your questions, I'll be happy to answer them.

The Amazon Catalog

It's deliciously interesting that a week after Orvis tells us the catalog is being retired I receive 64 pages of perfect-bound confusion from Amazon.

How, in the name of the old Sears catalog, is Orvis smarter than Amazon?

Everything that is wrong with modern catalog marketing is joyously on display in this catalog.

Can I show you something?

When I visited Amazon.com a few minutes ago, they knew me better than any other brand knows me. Look at what they show me.

Headphone amps, iems, a 1TB card that I'd like for music that I haven't even looked at on Amazon but I intend on purchasing soon, food, dog treats, omeprazole ... they know me better than I know myself.

This is the kind of stuff I'm begging you, the loyal reader, to do. Why don't you complement your marketing efforts with a little knowledge of each individual customer/user/visitor?

Now let's look at one page from the Amazon catalog.

How could a company that is so smart online be so utterly untargeted, unfocused, and just plain confused in print? Here's some of the gems they thought thought I should see on just this one page (page 55):

• Ice Cream Maker
• Nail Clipper Set
• Water Color Paint Set
• Doxie Ice Cube Mold
• SET Card Game
• Pea Pod Pill Case
• Pigma Micron Fileliner Pens
• Pad of Butter Notepad
• Crab Tea Infuser
• Pug Dog Hair Clipper
• Spongioli Kitchen Sponges
• Dog People Pens
• Unzipped Hand-Blown Glass Bowl
• Cherry Pie Jigsaw Puzzle
• Ceramic Coffee Cup
• Sheet Mask Set
• Sushi Socks Box
• Fortune Cookie Ornament
• Jonathan Alder Wood Domino Set

So, kudos for product density (19 products on one page). That's haulin' some product.

But, on just one page of the catalog, Amazon cleverly illustrates the waste of print when compared to the laser-like precision of their home page. One is product-vomit. One is well-tailored to my interests.

I know, I'm going to be criticized by the paper/print/catalog-agency folks for not appreciating the "whimsy and discovery" of print. Your catalog agency would be the first to tell you that if you did this, you wouldn't have a clear point of view and that you were being wasteful without a compelling story to tell.

2024. More than a half-decade since Amazon started sending catalogs ... the year Orvis discontinued a catalog. We live in interesting times.

Gone Fishing

One of the shifts I see across feedback from y'all is a shift in thinking about what you sell.

Here's an analogy.

Maybe you've gone fishing. Lake perch. Ohhhhh ... so yummy. The best perch sandwich in the world is at Late's in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The bun is a big part of the story there. But I digress.

Anyway, you could go perch fishing ... you'd pick a lake and choose some bait (#silverwigglers) and away you go. You might have some success, you might not. Then somebody tells you that there are twenty lakes where you could go fishing ... so you spend every day going to all of these lakes with your silver wigglers and it's exhausting.

Then, one day, somebody tells you they catch three times as many perch as you catch on the original lake ... but they're using wax worms. You try wax worms, and you realize that was worms are the secret ... you could have gone to your neighborhood lake forever using wax worms and had success. You realize that bait matters ... a lot more than you thought it did.

In the analogy, lakes are channels, fish are customers, and bait is merchandise.

In 2024, as catalog marketing dies and Facebook/Google become expensive places that deliver customers with low long-term value, I'm seeing more professionals (i.e. you) focusing on the bait ... on the merchandise. As has happened since the beginning of time, we shift back and forth on the pendulum ... there was a time 25 years ago when optimizing for customer lifetime value was very important. Then we spent fifteen years optimizing for clicks (which, if you look at politics, was/is an unmitigated disaster), we then spent a decade optimizing for channels (which bankrupted retailers and ended catalog marketing ... the opposite of the desired effect). The pendulum is now shifting back to what you sell ... it's like looking at a spread analysis from 1991, except adapted to a digital reality. 

Instead of saying that the creative in an email message must look like "x" and we A/B test to find out the best "x", we're shifting ... "what" we sell in an email marketing message is the bait, and it turns out that bait is incredibly important. Duh! But each generation learns old lessons anew, and I'm thrilled that we're heading in this direction now.

It's time for marketers to post a "Gone Fishing" sign.

Ending The Catalog: A Checklist

I've been associated with catalog shutdowns for two decades ... either shutting the darn thing down or reducing circulation to only the most productive customers. Not a popular person around catalog agencies, paper reps or printers ... but it's a necessary job.

If you're saying to yourself right now ... "geez, idiot, you're talking a lot about Orvis in the past week", you're right. There are a lot of things I know that I can't talk about, and if one of the most conservative brands in the history of commerce does something stunning, you should pay attention.

Let's introduce a "checklist" for determining whether you can get away from paper as well. Share the list with your boutique catalog agency, if they push back, well, it tells you something, doesn't it?

Still Generating Mail/Phone Orders:  If you still generate 10% or more of your orders via mailed-in checks (yes, Gen-Z, that still happens, splash some water on your face and pick yourself up off the ground) or via phoned-in orders at your call center, you cannot get away from catalog marketing without pain.

Annual Repurchase/Rebuy Rate > 40%:  If your annual rebuy rate (12-month buyers) is north of 40%, it is much easier to get away from catalog marketing. If it is above 55%, pull the rip cord, it's over.

Mail/Holdout Test Results:  If you chose to not execute mail/holdout tests, you cannot get away from catalog marketing. You simply don't have the knowledge necessary to know what to do. If you've executed mail/holdout tests and more than 70% of sales are organic (i.e. still happen) when catalogs are not mailed, you may prepare your catalog exit plan.

New Customers:  Any brand generating 35% or more new customers through catalog marketing needs to create a two-year transition plan before beginning an exit from catalogs. Most of you have figured out how to move on from catalog customer acquisition. If you're still having fancy dinners with your co-op partners in Colorado, it's time to begin your two-year transition plan.

YouTube:  Here's a simple guideline ... you should have as many YouTube followers as you have circulation depth for your primary November catalog. If you have fewer YouTube followers than November catalog recipients, you are doing something wrong. You are a media company, not a catalog brand. You want some inspiration? Look at some of the videos created by King Arthur Baking Company (click here). Or on Instagram, where they are also popular (nearly a million followers). You can do this! You are a media company who monetizes content by selling merchandise instead of selling advertising space.

Personalization:  If you are not sending personalized merchandise assortments to each individual email marketing recipient, you are not ready to transition away from catalogs. You simply do not understand the preferences of your customers ... you are a mass marketer, and that's why you still mail a one-to-many catalog to so many customers. There 20% to 50% gains to be had personalizing the merchandise assortment to your customer base. Brands without catalogs (i.e. almost all brands) have to hustle to be successful.

Community:  If you don't have at least 1-3 "experts" who speak passionately about what you sell and are publicly recognized by your customer base ... 1-3 experts you can build a community around, you are at least two years away from being able to even think about not sending catalogs anymore. The very fact that most of you will say "well, we're two years away" after reading this and then do absolutely nothing about it makes me sad.

Digital Ad-To-Sales Ratio:  The inverse of ROAS, ad-to-sales ratios for digital marketing that are < 10% suggest "opportunity". When you take the catalog away, you'll be able to increase digital marketing efforts as the catalog won't cannibalize digital efforts via misguided matchback analytics. If your ad-to-sales ratio for digital efforts is already over 20%, well, how do you think you'll make up the sales you lose when the catalog disappears?

Email Marketing Share of Annual Sales:  Your email marketing program (which I do not lump in with digital efforts) should already make up 25% of your annual sales. If email marketing comprises at least 25% of annual sales, you may move forward and begin winding down catalog operations. If email marketing is < 10% of annual sales, you may never be able to get away from catalog marketing, because you haven't built out all of the necessary marketing skills required to speak to customers outside of print.

Demographic Overlay:  If at least a quarter of your customers are age 65-79, you will mail catalogs for years to come ... and then hit an abrupt and highly predictable cliff. If you don't have many 65-79 year old customers, you may move forward and begin winding down catalog operations. Catalog marketing is distinctly targeted at Baby Boomers.

Profitable Stores:  Any market where you have 10% pre-tax profit on sales attributed to stores is a market where you no longer need to mail catalogs. Why are you mailing catalogs AND paying for expensive brick 'n mortar? Over. End Game.

Equal Monthly Sales:  If you generate half the sales in May that you generate in November, you are less dependent on marketing and consequently you can get away with mailing fewer catalogs. Brands with reasonably equal monthly sales tend to generate more "organic" sales than do brands that are highly/seasonally dependent.

November / December Ratio:  If you generate more sales in the two weeks prior to Black Friday / Cyber Monday than you generate in the two weeks after, you cannot as easily get away from catalog marketing. Older customers have institutional memory of not receiving a package in 1994 and they order early as a consequence. Younger customer expect to order from you on December 14 and receive merchandise on December 16 ... this is the audience that doesn't need a catalog.

Vendor Office:  If your paper team or your printer leases a satellite office a quarter mile from your campus, you are not going to easily get away from catalog marketing. This is a clear sign that your "trusted partners" control your brand. It gets even harder if you let these folks have a cubicle in your office campus ... and it gets harder still if that cubicle becomes a walled office with a door. Worse, if these folks are "collaborating" with you on your circulation plan, you're doomed.

Merchandise Reporting:  If you don't have reporting that shows you what sells best via print and what sells best via digital efforts, you are two years away from even thinking about ending catalog marketing ... you simply do not have the intelligence to make a proper decision.

Merchandise Preference:  If what you sell performs just as well digitally as it does in print, you are much closer to the end than are brands where the merchandise assortment is fundamentally different between print and digital. When the best-selling item ranking list is very similar, you can trust a customer to buy from digital channels. When the ranking is different and you take away a channel, don't expect the customer to go with you.

• Hint:  It has been my experience that catalog brands are not good ... not good ... at understanding the merchandise/channel dynamic. This lack of knowledge harms catalog brands, costing them profit.

I'll stop here for now. If you don't know the answers to these questions, you'll need to start working with me right away so we can figure out what your future looks like (kevinh@minethatdata.com).

Times Are Changing

This is a fun graph.

One of my favorite images of all time was this misguided one from McKinsey about twenty years ago. Long-time readers have heard my gripes ... many times ... silly Venn Diagram.

The image was a colossal analytical failure because there is a confounding variable ... as customers purchase more and more, they are more and more likely to purchase from multiple channels. The analysis error is identical to saying "Customers Who Purchase On Multiple Days Of The Week Are More Valuable Than Customers Buying From Just One Day Of The Week". You'll buy from multiple days of the week when you buy at least twice ... by definition, you'll buy from just one day of the week when you buy just one time. Purchase Frequency is the confounding variable here.

Reality:  Your customers only want to purchase from you "x" times per year. That's it. You have a small number of customers who will buy from you a lot. The vast majority of your customer base is locked into a small number of annual purchases.

Here's where the retail chart and the Venn Diagram come into play. If your customer is locked into a small number of purchases per year (as most are), and you keep offering the customer more ways to purchase, you will divide up a small number of orders across a large number of marketing/physical channels. This means weak channels will lose, by definition they have to lose ... they only way more marketing channels (and the investment involved with each of them) can win is if merchandise productivity increases.

Worse, if your merchandise productivity decreases ... weaker channels immediately become much, much weaker. Weak stores immediately become untenable. Weak marketing channels, like catalogs, become untenable.

This is what the Paper/Printing/USPS world did not understand. They constrained supply, they increased costs to you ... at the very same time that you had all of the digital marketing channels eating away at legacy print channels ... a double-whammy that accelerated the demise of the Paper/Printing/USPS folks. These folks executed the exact wrong strategy ... when marketing channels are weakening, the cost to execute within those channels must come down. Not up. Down.

What do you want Orvis to do, folks? Sell on Amazon, a strong marketing channel that promises consistent variable profit while giving up a corner of your soul ... or keep expensive stores open and expensive paper in the mail while orders flow out of those channels into more lucrative marketing channels? Orvis may not realize it, but Orvis might be (long-term) headed down a path not unlike Truthear is with iems selling on Headphones.com and Amazon. I work with enough clients, and get to see enough "alternate channel / marketplace" transactions to see a version of the future where traditional "brands" become "vendors".

Times are changing. Your marketing team often feels overwhelmed with too many marketing channels to manage and not enough profit. Marketing channel contraction is coming for brands with weak or average merchandise productivity.

A Post-Tropical Cyclone

A tropical system doesn't stay a tropical system forever. Take Milton for instance. A Category 5 hurricane at two different periods earlier this week, the storm slammed into Florida, was shredded apart by land, then emerged in the Atlantic as a post tropical cyclone.

In other words, the storm is transformed by a traumatic event ... sure, we as humans experience a hurricane as a traumatic event, but the hurricane also experiences a traumatic event. Without boiling hot ocean water to fuel it, the storm transforms from a storm of tropical characteristics to a garden-variety low pressure system (or becomes even less than that).

So it is with catalog brands.

A catalog brand experiences a traumatic event (decreased co-op performance ... then the paper catastrophe of 2021 followed by printers firing catalogers in 2022 and the erratic USPS) ... resulting in the end of the brand as a catalog brand ... but it does not mean it is the end of the brand. The brand is transformed ... "post-tropical" if you will.

Milton is still out there in the Atlantic. It's different now, shredded apart by Florida.

Orvis is still out there in New England. It's different now, shredded apart by market forces. They get to take full advantage of their new status ... post-catalog if you will.

Similarly, you get to take full advantage of your new status when the time comes. And it is most certainly coming. Celebrate it. Look back and be proud of what you've accomplished ... then get busy in your "post" world.

End of the Line for the Orvis Catalog

When a traditional catalog brand makes changes, I get a head's up via blog / email subscriber metrics.

1. Blog unsubscribes happen from the company as much as a month before a decision is made, because some employees no longer have a need for the content I produce.
2. LinkedIn requests for connections happen close to the implementation date of the decision.
3. Email addresses bounce as the decision is made.

So, yeah, I knew something was up at Orvis (click here for the news, sent to us by a long-time reader). And yes, close to 20% of my catalog-centric email subscribers have disappeared in the past eighteen months (offset by new e-commerce brand subscribers, of course).

As a CEO tells me, "there is no catalog industry".

Brands go though a fascinating transition when the catalog disappears:

Reactivation:  Customers with recency between 13 and 60 months are impacted, especially Baby Boomer customers. When you take print away from these customers, sales decrease and reactivation rates decrease. In many ways, you are discontinuing the brand to customers age 65-79, it's not dissimilar to going out of business to this audience. Here, the impact will be significant. This crowd can be loud and angry about the topic, in ways not dissimilar to supporting a candidate for political office.

Community:  If your marketing team is smart, they laid the foundation for this transition. The marketing team shifts the marketing message from "one-to-many" (print) to "many-to-many" (community). Your marketing team will have a strong video presence (YouTube), they will have a strong community platform that allows customers to interact with each other and with employees, they will have a personalized email marketing program (especially from a merchandising standpoint), they will have a customer development program to migrate customers from Struggling/Average productivity to Loyal/Elite productivity. They will have experts that customers trust, those experts become the voice of the brand. It's a complete overhaul of the focus of the marketing team from broadcasting to interacting. If this overhaul doesn't happen two years before the catalog is discontinued ... woo-boy, you've got a fun two years coming at you.

Merchandise:  The transition here catches my clients off-guard. When the catalog disappears, the 60-79 year old customer disappears, which means the products that a 60-79 year old customer purchase start to fail. Meanwhile, customers age 30-59 are largely not impacted by the change ... they keep buying what they've always purchased. If a merchandising team does not have proper reporting to thoroughly measure this transition, there are all sorts of problems ... inventory management gets screwed up in these situations, resulting in discounts/promotions and a pollution of the remaining customer file (they're tainted by being trained to expect lower prices).

All of these issues await Orvis.

Interestingly ... a quick Google search showed how the world is changing. Look at the brand selling Orvis merchandise in the image below. Time change.

CanJam

A few weeks back I attended my first-ever CanJam ... a headphone conference.

Yeah. I'm a nerd.

Not surprisingly, the folks at Headphones.com were everywhere. They sponsored the event, they had a booth where you could try exotic headphones or the headphones they sold. You could interact with their staff (blue shirts above) ... the very people who lead their popular Noise Floor podcast / weekly video program on YouTube. Their hosts (you'd likely call 'em "influencers") led well-attended sessions about the science of the ear and impact on what you hear with your headphones.

I heard a headphone / amp combination (Meze Empyrian II ... available for just under $3,000 on Headphones.com ... paired with a $2,000 Ferrum Oor Desktop Headphone Amp) that, as I told my wife, was "like having God reach down and touch you in the brain".

The best voice I heard in a headphone? The ancient Sennheiser HD600 for just $349. Bonnie Raitt sounded like she was in my living room.

Conference organizers were expecting a comparable or larger crowd than the 2,500 who attended the two-day event in Irvine last year.

If you are in the Dallas area the first weekend in November, head over to the event.

I am not being paid to say this.

I am encouraging you, the humble business professional, to do "something". So many of you are telling me it is too hard to find new customers in 2024. Of course it is. This is where hard work comes in.

What stops you, especially if you are a $5,000,000 to $95,000,000 business, from creating your version of CanJam? Seriously, what stops you? If you sell widgets, spend a year building out a media division, become "the" community for widgets online, then bring together the widget community with your own events ... in person, online, I could care less ... do something! If you sell collectibles or gifts, be THE place on the internet people come to learn about collectables or gifts.

As I write this, I'm watching "You've Got Mail" ... a nearly 30 year old movie about the death of a local bookstore, run out of business by the big/bad Fox Books and their low-priced store across the street. I'll bet "The Shop Around The Corner" had a very difficult time acquiring customers before succumbing to Fox Books (who would have eventually succumbed to Amazon, and so goes capitalism). The Shop Around The Corner failed ... but all across America independent book stores somehow got through the transition. They built a community, and what they sold catered to their community. Don't compete against Amazon. Create your own market.

I mean, 70% of people who own headphones own an Apple pair or Bose Noise Cancelling headphones or Beats (also Apple). In the face of such steep competition, how in the heck is CanJam generating record attendance? How in the heck does Headphones.com stay in business when you can buy from Amazon tonight and have your new iems tomorrow ... the same ones you'd get on Headphones.com?

I spent much of tonight listening to my new Meze Alba iems. The only reason I bought them is because the Headphones.com reviewers liked them, the guys hosting the Headphones.com  podcast liked them, and the community on Reddit liked them. So I gave Headphones.com $159 of my money. They created the purchase (my first purchase from Headphones.com) with hard work and a lot of indirect selling, earning a newly acquired customer in the process. They didn't pay Facebook, they didn't pay Google, and they didn't give Amazon a hefty cut of the profit. 

They created the purchase out of thin air.

You, too, are going to have to do the hard work of creating purchases out of thin air.

You've got this. Get busy!

P.S.:  How do I stay in business? I pay nobody. Nobody. I create purchases out of thin air from you, the community reading this content.

What Should An Analyst Actually Do?

Allow me to show you.

First, watch this video - it's pure interbreed dog craziness. 

https://x.com/i/status/1841956538048520557

We can break down the action into a series of images. Like this one. I've time-stamped each image for reference purposes.

We have a German Shepherd who leaves the pen, then jumps back in. Each time the German Shepherd jumps back in, one of the cream colored doxies (we'll call this pup "Sparky") tries to jump up and take a nibble out of the neck of the German Shepherd. Look at the elevation ... the extension of the back legs. Also notice that another cream colored doxie owns the observation deck.

Moving along.

Sparky is feeling a lot of joy ... Sparky already pivoted in anticipation of another chase.

In fact, three doxies are already anticipating more mayhem (above). Three seconds later (below), the German Shepherd has left the pen!

Sparky goes vertical, a little early if you ask me.

Again, Sparky excels at pivoting in mid-air. There's a lot of raw athleticism on display. Also, there will be a day eight years from now where a vet will say "Sparky has three bulging discs, do you know why?" and the owner will say, "no, I have no idea why".

Within the matter of one second, and for reasons unknown to anybody, one of the doxies decides that deck doxie needs to get lit up.

So yeah, deck doxie is about to get lit up. As you can see from the time stamps this all happens within the period of one (1) second. Deck doxie is not only ready, but gets in a series of nips that the black doxie doesn't appreciate.

In pickleball, we call those "counterattacks".

Notice that it only took Sparky one full second to refocus on the German Shepherd.

It's back to live action.

Once again, notice the outstanding bodily extension Sparky exhibits on each leap.

Sparky also behaves in chaotic and unpredictable manners. Seconds later, Sparky is headed back to the deck - and is quite happy about it.

The German Shepherd senses a chance to engage with Sparky, and heads to the deck. Sparky senses an opportunity, goes for the neck, and blows out two additional discs in the exchange.

The scene ends with a winded German Shepherd guzzling water from a bacteria-laden tray of tepid water.

What have we learned?

• The German Shepherd is an instigator. Via seemingly innocent acts, the German Shepherd causes complete chaos.
• Sparky ... well ... wow. Full of vim and vigor, Sparky is entertaining in an athletically manic sort of way.
• Deck Doxie ... willing to counterattack if required. If you don't want hip nips, stay away from Deck Doxie.
• Black Colored Doxie ... unsure of role, clearly smart and unwilling to damage joints by recklessly jumping after the German Shepherd, occasionally attempts to assert control over other doxies, then acts surprised when suffering a series of hip nips.

There are other characters in this plot, but they only play a support role ... like the waiter at a restaurant in a movie.

This, dear Analysts, is your job. It's your job to dissect a chaotic situation with seemingly unlimited moving parts, assign value to the individual players, and then communicate clearly enough that anybody following the plot can ... follow the plot. I mean, if you don't watch the video clearly enough, you'd never know that deck doxie is a hip nipper ... you'd come to the conclusion that deck doxie is just a distant observer.

Get busy breaking down chaotic scenes with many moving parts ... it's fun!

P.S.:  This also applies to Executive Leadership. It's your job to break down a chaotic and complicated business into individual parts that can be acted upon for the benefit of the p&l. Right?