Catalogues motivate shoppers to buy more
Marketers look for innovative ways to get shoppers to flip through catalogues
The T. Eaton Company introduced its first catalogue in 1884, and while Eaton's is no longer with us, there are still plenty of catalogues around as marketers adapt them to fit today's technologies.
Catalogues aren't as welcome or necessary as they were when most Canadians were living far from big stores and mail was the primary communications medium. So marketers have come up with innovative ways to get us to pick up and use their catalogues.
By getting us to take photos of our favourite catalogue pages and post them online for a chance to win, Ikea generated additional shoppers.
Similarly, the above Ikea video encourages us to shop its 2015 catalogue in a parody of Apple's reverential product launch videos.
It's interesting that one of the world's major catalogues would make fun of Apple, since when the Apple iPad was launched in 2010 — in a video much like this — it almost single-handedly rejuvenated the catalogue segment.
As more shoppers migrated to online product searches in the early 2000s, fewer printed catalogues were necessary. You could simply decide what you wanted, find it at an online store, and buy it.
But it turns out such an efficient process wasn't so great for retailers, so the iPad's ability to make book-like e-catalogues possible was a welcome innovation.
Thanks to apps like catalogs.com, the iPad and other tablets put catalogues back into people's hands.
The reason this is important is because catalogues encourage aimless browsing, so buying is dictated more by what we see rather than what we need. This results in lots of unplanned purchases, which spells big profits for retailers.
Such apps amalgamate hundreds of constantly updated catalogues, so your tablet becomes a huge multi-brand catalogue enabling instant purchases.
While catalogues — both hard copy and tablet-based — are good for retailers, they're not so good for consumers trying to stay on budget.
If you'd like to avoid spending money on stuff you don't need, stay away from browsing — both in catalogues and at the mall. Instead, stick to purposeful searches either online or in store. Simply decide what you need beforehand, go in, buy it, and get out.