Read All About It: Catalogs Are Hot Right Now

Old school but up to date

Just like mom jeans, scrunchies and bag charms, good-old-fashioned print catalogs are so back. Amazon, J.Crew and more have brought back such lavishly-illustrated sales tools in recent years, with more brands jumping in every season. This is more than a throwback—it’s a comeback.

But what gives? Why are marketers reviving this medium, and why are they such a hit with consumers?

Some very good reasons:

Catalogs cut through the clutter

For today’s digitally fatigued consumers, catalogs are a welcome change from the endless scroll of content they interact with daily. Unlike shopping online, a print catalog is not a bottomless pit of possibilities. And there’s literally zero chance that a pop-up message will overlay any page you pause on.

You get to actually look at what you choose to look at—the perfect outfit in an idyllic setting, a cleverly annotated kitchen gadget, an impeccably designed watch. All without being rendered powerless by an algorithm that thinks you should be strafed by a 15 percent discount offer if you sign up for a newsletter right now.

In our endlessly fractured attention economy, print catalogs stand out because they put consumers back in control of their own attention.

Catalogs are strategically targeted

When catalogs were ubiquitous (Sears, Spiegel, Ikea), marketers used them for mass reach, in some cases mailing them to tens of millions of homes. Today, brands often target them to a highly curated list of customers and prospects, using them to convert likely new fans and increase the lifetime value of current ones.

J.Crew’s revived catalog went to consumers who were on the website and opted in to receive it, or who grabbed copies at brick-and-mortar stores or select newsstands. When our client Amazon released its holiday toy catalog, consumers took to social media trying to find out how to get one. Done right, catalog marketing can take on an aura of exclusivity.

For marketers, this makes catalogs a strategic investment to reach high-value audience members. For consumers, receiving one provides a sense of the discernment that went into creating it—that actual human beings thoughtfully curated a selection of cool stuff for you to consider buying for yourself or the people you love.

Catalogs tell a complete story that sticks around

If the best marketers are master storytellers, then catalogs give them the perfect platform to create a brand story, start to finish—in one complete, distilled package that consumers will return to again and again. Writer, editor and podcaster Alyssa Vingan calls such packaged storytelling a very special kind of world-building. Because catalogs are, by definition, persistent (carried in handbags and left on kitchen counters), a carefully crafted brand story can receive multiperson touch-points over long periods of time.

Catalogs are omnichannel

The contemporary consumer journey is all about constantly bridging the digital and the physical when it comes to shopping. And catalogs are no longer just a print medium. The ubiquity of QR codes—and consumers’ growing willingness to scan them—allows today’s catalogs to connect with the larger e-commerce ecosystem. Amazon’s print catalogs, for instance, are filled with QR codes and text prompts (e.g., “Scan to shop covetable beauty gifts and more”) to help shoppers go exactly where they want to go on Amazon’s website or app.

In a world of unlimited options, catalogs offer a reprieve for consumers and marketers alike. As shopping experiences, they’re self-contained, seamless, manageable. Done right, they’re a pleasure to page through. And most of all, from a consumer perspective, they’re simple—and make buying simple, too.