The Edutainment Catalog and The Learning Co., Mattel Inc.’s units for direct sales of educational software, will join forces to create an internal joint database in late fall.
The new file, to be used for cross promotion and modeling, will include in excess of 10 million names, says Bob Dodge, vice president of catalog sales and marketing for The Learning Co., Boulder, CO.
While the two catalogs obviously have some natural synergy, they do have distinct audiences, notes Dodge. Edutainment buyers are very upscale; they’re likely parents purchasing software that might help their children get into good colleges. The Learning Co.’s customers tend to be more “typical middle America” and the computer isn’t as important a part of the household.
The new database also will include names from Parsons Technology, a catalog of adult productivity and hobbyist software owned by The Learning Co. Mattel is considering including names from its direct response sales of toys and other products.
Much of the growth of 5-year-old Edutainment – acquired by The Learning Co. in December 1997 – is attributable to making the most of prospecting files through regression modeling, Dodge says. In his experience, this works better for “niche” titles like Edutainment, as opposed to more broad-audience catalogs like The Learning Co. The joint database will allow the company to create better models in house, as well as optimize models created by vendors such as Abacus and Polk.
Dodge would like to identify software buyers who would be brand loyal to his catalog family. Previous cross-branding efforts with Parsons and The Learning Co. – acquired by El Segundo, CA-based Mattel last year – fell short of expectations.
About 22% of Edutainment’s revenue is from teachers, who receive the same catalog as consumers, though with a “less fun, more serious” cover. The company is considering expanding this business; B-to-B response rates are only one-third that of consumer responses to the catalog, but the average B-to-B order is triple the usual consumer purchase, according to Dodge.
While there isn’t a lot of cross promotion between the two educational catalogs now, there is list sharing, Dodge says. Edutainment’s annual catalog circulation is about 8 million – considerably higher than the 3 million mailed by The Learning Co., which relies more on solo mailings promoting individual software titles. But Edutainment’s house file has only 750,000 names, much less than The Learning Co.’s “millions” of names, some from DR purchases, others from software registrations.
All of Mattel’s catalogs have an online presence. While Web sales vary from brand to brand, Dodge claims they comprise a surprisingly low percentage of overall sales.
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