Adapt

July 30, 2014

Catalogs are still alive. (Just not made of trees.)

Catalogs are not dead. Or even dying. They’re evolving.
The concept “catalog” has been given last rites a number of times, but it rallies back. It climbed off its deathbed when the big omnibus printed catalogs started keeling over. Remember Monkey Ward’s? Specialized catalogs aimed at carefully crafted segments, however, survived.

catalog

Catalogs are not part of the zombie apocalypse. Not digital ones, anyway.

Printed catalogs were decimated but not obliterated by the digital revolution. They start to become obsolete the moment they leave the printing press. They’re unable to adjust to changes in inventory or pricing. Small wonder they got into a death spiral. Despite those drawbacks a few zombie-logs still arrive by snail mail. Uncontrolled waste circ has to be watched carefully. Postage kills.

Online catalogs are the survivors. Many of them share the same flaw we discussed earlier about brochures: they are passively, boringly static. This was okay in earlier eras. In today’s three-screen saturation, not so much.

Plotzing the traditional printed catalog online is a failure of imagination. So much more can be done to engage the prospective buyer. To monitor what they’re looking at, to discover what they find engaging. To improve their UX. To reshape catalog contents fueled by better analytics. To make meaningful offers at precisely the right time, when user activity triggers rulesets.

To do all that, consider publishing your online catalog in the form of a KinetiZine™, the interactive digital content delivery platform that can really improve your prospects.

Can we remake your catalog into a much more effective sales tool? One with superior analytics that can tell you the people fascinated by page 18? Pausing long enough for you to identify her as an interested party, ripe for an automated response? Why yes. Yes we can. Call us* and let’s talk about it.

*In the US, 1.312.836.0050. Or email bob@killianbranding.com

Evolve