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December 01, 2006
Weighty Marketing Matters '06
It's time for our second annual Weighty Marketing Matters, where we weigh the total amount of unwanted, unsolicited catalogs our household receives during the holiday season.
You may recall from last year's slothfest that we took in 14 pounds of catalogs between Nov. 21 and Dec. 22, 2005.
This year, the weigh-in started off with a thud on Nov. 20. In less than two weeks, the spam scale has topped a fatuous 19 pounds, shattering last year's benchmark. Nineteen pounds of pure marketing fat.
Early multiple offenders include Crate & Barrel, J. Crew, Pottery Barn, Nordstrom and Harry & David, all of whom have sent three catalogs each. So far.
We'll do a final weigh-in on Dec. 22. That is, if the tally is less than 50 pounds. That's as high as the scale goes.
Update: I should point out that I'm not opposed to catalogs per se, I'm opposed to catalog spam. I receive a few catalogs to which the company has thoughtfully obtained my permission, and those are not included in the final weigh-in.
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Just in case you thought that the ideas behind the shifting control of marketing were intangible, conceptual or abstract, please consider the Weighty Marketing Matters 06 post from the Church of the Customer blog. Between November 20 and Decem... [Read More]
Now that's what I call waste. Imagine if we can do something similar for the number of junk emails that we get. If we connect every word of them line by line on a per mailbox basis, it may even reach Pluto or further!
Ben - I wasn't around to see this last year - but what an awesome concrete example of marketing fat! I bet I would break your scale. What's funny to me is that purchases I've made online have generated so much mail for me (not just email - actual mail). Why would someone send snail mail to someone that has only ever dealt with you online???? (I really have to be careful about the boxes I check and uncheck - but somehow I feel like they send it anyway).
Shame on you!
My house, I'm not making this up, put 80 pounds of catalogs on the curb today for recycling. That was two weeks worth.
Slackers.
Heh. We'll try to catch up... (long Borat-like pause)... not.
I don't mind *some* holiday catalogues. I rarely ever shop directly from them, but sometimes they'll remind me to visit the retailer's website. If I can't buy a product on the Internet, I just won't buy it, so I consider catalogues my Internet shopping "cheat sheets". I wish some companies could pare down a bit, though. Hammacher sends a new catalogue about twice a month, always with the same content. Highlights magazine must have sold my info when I placed one order, as now I'm bombarded with catalogues for children's toys. If I don't pick up my mail every single day in November and December, the poor mailman has to start to stack it in the special "Large mailbox for parcels".
Leigh-Ann, thanks for commenting. The point I'm trying to make is that there are too many unwanted catalogs that arrive without permission. Multiply that by 100 million American households and soon we're talking about collosal waste. I'll happily shop from catalogs I request, not from ones that arrive unsolicited.
BusinessWeek just commented that Victoria's Secret sends out 400 Million catalogues in the US alone. That's right, 400 Million. That's roughly 1.3 for every american. Who ever said the internet would kill the paper business...?
400 million??? That's an astounding figure. And heartbreaking.
I confirm 400 Million.
RE. Business Week 0f 22 NOV, article by Louise Lee called "Catalogs, catalogs, everywhere".
Excerpt:
"A big mass-mailer like Victoria's Secret ships 400 million of them annually, or 1.33 for every American citizen. What can Victoria's Secret possibly get out of those 400 million catalogs? Plenty. Last year its catalog and online orders accounted for nearly 28% of its overall revenues of $4.4 billion. Those sales grew by 10%, more than double the 4% increase from its stores. Catalogs have become so important to the retailer that it even lists the cost of mailing, paper, and printing as a "risk factor" in its financial statements because an increase in those expenses could hurt earnings. That's not the only potential trouble: The lingerie company has drawn fire in recent years from forest conservation groups."
While we are all praise for excellence is relationship (and citizenship...!) marketing it seems that, sadly, the days of random shooting are not over yet.
Here's an example of a huge corporation making environmentally responsible strides:
UPS goes paperless
