Catalog Age Becomes Multichannel Merchant
Once upon a time, catalogers sold through catalogs, and retailers sold through stores.
But most companies are now channel-agnostic. They realize that they must go well beyond their core channel to reach the largest pool of potential buyers.
To reflect those changes, Direct’s sister publication Catalog Age is being renamed Multichannel Merchant, effective with the May 15 issue.
Multichannel Merchant will have a combined, unduplicated circulation of more than 30,000 subscribers (85% one-year direct request) at over 21,000 unique locations. The product will serve catalog companies, online merchants, retailers, manufacturers and wholesale/distributors who sell via print catalogs and/or transactional Web sites. A BPA audit will take place in June.
Content from sister publication Operations & Fulfillment — including proprietary benchmarks, features about call centers, warehouse management, picking/packing, fulfillment, and plenty of hands-on information — will be moved into Multichannel Merchant as well.
“The addition of the operations content makes the brand more robust and ultimately even more valuable to our audience,” said Sherry Chiger, editorial director of Multichannel Merchant, who joined Catalog Age as features editor in 1995.
Despite the rebranding, Chiger assured readers that the basic content will remain the same, covering all aspects of multichannel sales and marketing, including print and the Internet. “But because we are now incorporating Operations & Fulfillment into our brand, we will be offering more extensive coverage of the back end of the business,” she said. “This is important because making the multiple channels mesh in terms of marketing, merchandising and branding requires a greater integration with operations than was necessary when only one channel was involved.”
The Multichannel Merchant franchise includes several e-mail newsletters: Multichannel Merchant Weekly (former Catalog Age Weekly), the O&F Advisor and List and Data Strategies. The magazine’s newly redesigned Web site, MultichannelMerchant.com, will feature a full Operations & Fulfillment section, and both the MM and O&F brands will continue to offer Webinars. The franchise also co-sponsors two annual conferences in conjunction with the Direct Marketing Association, NCOF and the Annual Catalog Conference, held this month in Orlando, FL.
Perhaps better than anyone, catalogers understand the power of reaching consumers via multiple channels. Print catalogers were the first to truly embrace the Internet, as they already had the expertise needed to sell and fulfill products remotely; a substantial investment wasn’t necessary to retool their marketing and back-end operations to reach out to online prospects.
Of course, catalogers were hardly alone online. Many start-ups skipped the catalog channel and chose to market exclusively on the Web. They struggled to build efficient fulfillment and distribution operations and to get the word out to prospects through broad-based marketing.
Catalogers continued to test and invest and build their online revenue as customers embraced the Internet. According to Catalog Age’s 2005 Benchmark Report on Operations, 35.5% of catalogers’ orders came from the Web, up from 24.1% in 2003 and 11.7% in 2001.
Catalog Age readers also are realizing the Web’s potential for prospecting: 95% use their sites to acquire names, compared with 44% in 2003.
