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Book Catalog
Do You Still Need A Paper Catalog?
With the growing trend to eliminate the paper publications and rely exclusively on electronic media, many companies that prints and distributes catalogs are wondering what to do. Should we print fewer catalogs? Should they rely exclusively on their Web catalogs? Often, the marketing staff and customer service are some of the catalogs are still useful and necessary. But the Ministry of Finance is to emphasize that the entire content catalog is available online, so why not eliminate the substantial costs of a paper book?
Some companies good database driven marketing are some of the catalogs circulating paper continues to drive online sales! What is happening here? How can some online marketing to develop without a paper catalog, while other retailers and distributors see strong correlations between traffic on catalog and Web sales?
Whether or not you need a paper catalog depends on your product category and how people best search for your type of product. Certain categories of products are best searched visual and others are searched by content or attributes of products.
Visual Research
People search for most product categories visually - in other words, they need to take many different images to reduce a wide range of options down to a specific choice. This is true of clothing, furniture, stationery, jewelry, watches, most household products and most types of office supplies with hundreds of other types of goods.
People shopping for such products like turning pages of paper back and forth, using the fuzzy logic of the brain to narrow the choices until they see something that looks like what they seek. For example, say you want a rack for your desktop. You probably can not easily formulate your needs in terms of exact size, color (you could call "tan", while the seller is called "putty") weight capacity retention shelves, etc. But if you laminated section shelving office supplies catalog, you should quickly find an image that "resonates" with the preconceived image of your mind that you hoped to find. At this point, you start reading the description and specifications in the table to see if it was the right choice for you.
For most product categories, is the optimal approach for the consumer: the pages flip in a paper catalog to allow your brain to evaluate a number of images to put you in the ballpark and then read the copy to make the right choice. For some reason, this kind of visual search is faster through a paper catalog that any research methodology, I found in online catalogs. So if your product category is the best shop using the visual search, you probably need to continue producing a paper catalog.
Search content attribute
But not all products are best searched using images. There is another series of product categories where the best research is based on attributes or content.
Even before the Internet, there was not much traffic catalogs. People bought books in stores because the books were already divided by topic and they could manually browse different choices that were stored next to each other to make their choice. It is a cumbersome process, but it was the best approach available before the advent of the Web if you want to shop for books based on content.
But books are a few product categories where the images are not important (the music is another). However, there are categories where the research methodology is not optimal images or content, it is based instead of product attributes. The best way to shop for certain types of electronic components such as resistors, transistors and semiconductors. The client characteristics between different techniques and special search engine finds products that match.
Anyway, how do you know - for certain - you need or have not need a paper catalog? This is the easy part: ask your customers.
What we learned is that for many product categories and for many people, ordering online is a good low cost alternative to place an order by phone but not a good replacement for search capabilities inherent in a product catalog paper. In fact, in both cases the research, 85% of the people had used a paper catalog to choose their products and did not use the online catalog at all.
You should do your own research to understand how things work in your category. Technology marketing online might one day develop a better tool for "fuzzy search visual" than flipping pages of a paper catalog. But for now, if your product depends on visual search, you should probably print more catalogs to grow your business. If you have any of these categories have experienced declining sales, you should conduct an analysis to see if your distribution strategy is correlated to your income.
About the Author
Chinee Printing Inc specializes in affordable high quality printing services including book, poster and catalog printing etc.
Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal (Chronicle Books)