Imagine receiving a survey on marketing practices. Now imagine receiving a marketing practices survey consisting of 25 multi-part questions spanning several different organization areas. Now consider that at least one of the questions has five categories, four of which have seven sub-questions. Oh, and the survey sponsor wants each of these questions answered to the nearest two-decimal place.
All of a sudden, being asked one's favorite laundry detergent doesn't seem quite as onerous.
But the American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA) isn't asking about preferred detergents. It's asking about catalog marketing practices—and yes, the survey described above is exactly the one ACMA president and executive director Hamilton Davison is asking every cataloger in America to fill out.
The questionnaire is so detailed that the ACMA suggests respondents print out a PDF worksheet before submitting answers online.
The sheer magnitude of the survey begs a few questions of its own, which I recently put to Davison.
Are you flippin' kidding with the size of this questionnaire? Why do you hate catalogers so much?
I recognize this is an enormous amount of work for all involved, but its import is huge. The climb is arduous, but the view is worth the climb. It's not that I hate catalogers. It is a tough survey, but we could not find any other way to get the job done except to lay out for everyone the facts.
Facts? Which facts? There are human genome maps that aren't as detailed as this.
The facts are that the catalog business model is not widely understood in policy-making circles.
As far as we have been able to determine, there is no definitive source of catalogers' mailing behavior. We need to offer policymakers more than just hopeful assertions. We need to have hard data, accurate facts and a full understanding of how catalog mailers use the postal service and its competitors so we can work with policymakers to come up with a useful rate regimen that is good for both sides, and that increases mail volume.
Why ask these questions all at once, as opposed to in waves? Why potentially overwhelm respondents?
There is a risk of that, but all of the data needs to refer to the same slice of time. If we were to do this over three surveys over two years, it would be virtually impossible for us to normalize that to a single 12-month time. And the need is now, so we determined it would be better to do it once and get it behind us, rather than make this protracted and less useful. Until we collect all this data we don’t have the comprehensive understanding of catalog mail use that we need to sit down and negotiate with policymakers.
On the survey itself you justify certain questions by saying you are exploring a variety of incentives with the USPS. Such as?
One is a prospecting rate, which would encourage mail-borne prospecting. That would be an incentive that provides economic stimulus to mail additional books beyond what would ordinarily be mailed. We're quantifying the multiplier effect.
Our proposition for the postal service guys is, if you understood how prospecting works you would give away prospecting [mailer postage]. Something on the order of 32 books will be mailed to converted customers, even if they never order again. If you want to stoke the fires of future mail volumes, enable prospecting mail at a greatly reduced rate so you encourage a cataloger to build up the house file. Every 12-month name on a list is going to get every mailer that year, and probably most are going to get a good portion of mailing events during the subsequent year, and those are at full [postage] price.
Was there any thought of an incentive, especially for the small operations that might not have the sheer manpower to tackle this? An iPad or a month's supply of Xanax, perhaps?
The real incentive is to demonstrate that we as an industry can manage our postal affairs. We need to get the industry to step up and participate in that process. We could get five of the biggest catalogers to respond and do something that would benefit that group, but our desire is to get something that works for the entire industry.
Once the information has been collected, to whom will it be presented and toward what end?
It will be presented in aggregated form to managers and officers at the USPS in finance, pricing and rate design and marketing, to share with them specifics on cataloger use of mail. All the survey respondents will also get a roll-up which will allow them to benchmark their company against industry averages and should be a useful analytical tool for running the business. That is a derivative benefit, not a primary purpose.
We will also be using this aggregated information with the regulator, the Postal Regulatory Commission, and with oversight committees on The Hill.
This survey asks for the family jewels of each catalog company. We recognize that we are asking for confidential and propriety information that is not generally released outside of the business. We are not going to release any data except in aggregate form. So the individual companies' proprietary secrets are secure.
To that end, only a limited number of people will have access to the full data set. There's a grand total of three. Me, [ACMA VP and deputy director] Paul Miller and a clerical level person at infoGroup who is actually extracting the survey information and sending it to us.
We may need to add a fourth–an analyst we'd hire. But everyone who works for the ACMA signs a very tight confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement, which we are happy to make available.
A rate increase was recently decided. New rates are scheduled to take place on Jan. 22, 2012. Why is collecting this information still relevant?
We are actively discussing incentives and ways to grow cataloging with the postal service. And this is independent of rate-setting, to some degree. The rates form the basic cost of postal products, but the incentives will look at how volume may be stimulated through incentive structures. And to do that properly we need to understand all of the downstream attributes of a mailing event.
According to the early survey results, postage represents 57% of total costs of marketing. It's an enormous cost center for every cataloger. We expect this will allow us to help manage the future postal expense to improve the economics of mail use, and in the process generate more catalog-originated mail.
It will also allow us to represent the industry in all sorts of forums. For instance, I have been talking to staff from the oversight committees on The Hill, and they are interested in these types of questions. The catalog business model is not widely understood. Once postal service and others understand how the catalog business model works, they will act in their own self-interest to grow catalog volumes in the future.
How's the response been so far?
We've collected data on 42 titles from 33 publishers. But we have a lot to do to get a representative sample. There may be 12,000 titles among 10,000 publishers.
We've had a phased rollout of the survey. We haven't gone to 1,000 companies and said fill this out. We are reaching out to all the relevant associations to invite them to be a sponsoring association with us in the execution of this survey. We have discussions in process with a couple of them.
We are also going out to the supplier community and asking vendors to be a sponsoring supplier by transmitting this survey to their clients. These suppliers have regular one on one meetings and we are asking them to incorporate a discussion around this survey in those regular client meetings.
Can a single person at a given catalog company answer all these questions reliably?
Not usually. Usually this information is going to be drawn from two or three functional areas within the company.
You may have designed the first survey to be answered by committee. I think you're a shoe-in for 2012's Most Hated Man In Catalog Distribution, at least if the votes of underlings are counted.
[Laughing] Life is hard, I guess. I wish this were simple. It's not simple.
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