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.