The Synaesthesia of Catalogs

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To those of you who celebrate, Happy Christmas Day. Why are you checking your email? Because it’s an owned channel.

Pop quiz: how many DTC catalogs do you get in the mail? None? Yeah, because they all come to me. I get, on average, three printed catalogs from all manner of direct to consumer brand catalogs. Parachute? Check. Roka? Check again. (by the by, both brands have been on the podcast this year)

Paper is making a comeback. Why? They work. Harvard Business Review posted results of a trial launch of a new paper catalog earlier this year in February. From that article: 

Of those customers, 5% of them received neither email nor catalogs for six months, 55% of them received a weekly marketing email, and 40% of them received the new bi-monthly catalogs in addition to the weekly email marketing. To control for effects of content, over 90% of the products were the same between emails and catalogs. The same set of photos and descriptions were also used in both media. We then tracked purchases and product inquiries across all three groups.

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Results showed that “Email + catalog” group experienced a 15% lift in sales and a 27% lift in inquiries, compared to “Email-only” group.

Immersive content is tough to pull off online, whereas print is full-bleed, full-stop. Your mailbox is also one of the view organic owned marketing channels, where every piece of content gets reviewed and considered before actioned upon. Others include SMS and email. And podcasts, but we’re a bit partial.

If a catalog shows up at your house, you’re pretty much guaranteed to review it.

Touch is one of The Senses, and touch is, well, hard to pull off online. This is where the synaesthesia of experience comes into play. Engaging more senses is more effective. Synaesthesia is the omnichannel of senses — linking together senses that otherwise are separate and distinct. Soul Cycle does this with light, music, and grapefruit-scented candles. Oh, and faux-spiritualism.

Catalogs give a potential customer one more touchpoint (pardon the pun) with your brand. They don’t harvest data, they don’t pop up persuasive offers, they aren’t engaged in the hard sell. They’re passive activations that, at minimum, get a perusal. At best, your brand can live not only rent-free in the customers’ head, but rent-free on their coffee table, too.