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Ten Tips for Catalogs that Work
1. Your catalog should reflect your brand identity.
If your catalog looks different than your store, which looks different from your Web site, you have a problem. Customers should see the same brand experience when they shop. That demands more than just using your logo.
Your brand personality should cross all media helping assure customers that they will receive the same quality and service everywhere. Coordinate the efforts of your retail, graphic and web designers to ensure consistency.
2. Don’t take square-inch analysis too literally.
This ratio provides useful insights, but it should not be taken at face value. Cramming more merchandise on a page doesn’t add up to higher sales if the effect is to crowd the page and lower its visual content and make it a “wall of words”. Those who want a spread to “work harder” may find that overall sales will actually rise by featuring fewer items and glamorizing them with design and layout.
3. Think in terms of the whole, not the individual pages.
A common mistake is focusing on what goes on a page rather than the visual impact of the catalog as whole. This can lead to tedious lookalike spreads. Catalogs benefit from pacing and surprise — simple silhouetted images, close-ups of details, wide angles, full-bleed photographs, lifestyle shots and the like sustain viewer interest and keep them turning pages.
4. Know your customer.
Understanding who your are selling to is essential for selecting your merchandise, styling your photographs, describing the product in the right tone of voice and developing your mailing list. It will determine the image you present, whether urban or rural, high style or wash-and-wear.
5. Don’t look upon feature copy as lost “selling space.”
Narrative catalog prose can enhance the buying process. Text may invite customers to enjoy the catalog in a leisurely manner and make the product selection more meaningful and unique. I must insert here that this article is manly based on business to consumer catalogs but the same psychology exist for business to business catalog.
6. The most expensive product doesn’t have to be the biggest object on the page.
Keep in mind that the goal is not to sell one product, but to make the whole catalog sell. By making the editorial concept of the catalog more interesting, people spend more time with it and, as a result, more things in the catalog tend to sell.
7. Making pages complex is visually too busy for the viewer. Most catalogs are visually busy — with eight to ten products per spread. If you shoot all products with complex backgrounds and propping, you magnify the busy-ness and confuse the reader. When planning photographs, limit the number used and make them large enough to be clear.
8. Don’t rely on supplied photographs.
Cutting costs by using manufacturer-supplied product photographs usually ends up with a mixed bag of lighting, styling and photo quality. The catalog looks disjointed and something less than if could be. It may show the product, but it doesn’t support the brand. The look and feel of the design must reinforce who you are. Individual products will come and go, but the survival of your brand depends on communicating in a cohesive and consistent voice.
9. Order forms are needed.
Since so much actual ordering is done by phone or on the company’s Web site, some catalogers believe that an order form is unnecessary. But research has shown that shoppers like to use the printed order form to list their purchases and gather the information they need. Especially for phone-in orders, this allows the operator to handle calls more accurately and efficiently.
10. Don’t sacrifice production value.
Catalog shoppers can’t examine merchandise firsthand, so they base their trust on what they can feel and see— the quality of the design, photography, paper and printing. When budgets get tight, these details often get cut first, since companies reason that if the products are the same, people won’t notice. They do. Keep in mind that presentation communicates the integrity of the products and the credibility of the brand and, ultimately, has the greatest impact on sales.
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