Selling of the Page All products are not created equal and as a cataloguer you will have to quickly grasp the concept of heroes and dogs. Your catalogue has to justify itself pretty early on in its development and all catalogues are created with a healthy dose of science and art. Obviously, aesthetics and creativity have to structure and define the proposition, but sales dictate whether a catalogue survives or not. "Mail order is a leap of faith, and if you are selling expensive items you need to tell a good story to justify the asking price"

Ian Simpson   Director   Catalogues 4 Business   www.c4b.co.uk

One of the disciplines that a cataloguer has to get used to is square inch analysis. In short, you analyse your products sales and measure them against the space they occupy within the catalogue. By carrying out this exercise you quickly get to grips with the fundamentals of how each product has to earn its keep and justify its space in the catalogue.

As a marketer you have to ensure that the promotional activity you undertake is justifying the financial outlay; catalogues are no exception. And if you include a product in your catalogue you have to ensure that its position and space justify its sales performance. This isn’t an article about space analysis, but it is important to be aware of this aspect of catalogue planning very early on.

The Flat Plan
Every catalogue is driven by its flat place, and you have to be prepared to spend many hours defining it and refining it before releasing it to your creative team.

Keep the flatplan simple with economical printing sections i.e. if web multiples of 8/16/32/48/64. If your plan falls between the two sections it can be very expensive, sheet fed is more flexible but uneconomical for long print runs.
 
Keep a sensible balance between selling and non-selling (institutional) pages. Remember that a small pagination catalogue needs to utilise all its space effectively; it has to have a high ratio of selling space to information.
In general, keep the products you are best known for to the front of the catalogue. You can take greater risks with your buyers but for prospecting your readers have to know what your catalogue is about very quickly.

By carrying out this exercise you quickly get to grips
with the fundamentals of how each product has to earn its keep
and justify its space in the catalogue.

Plan hotspots well in advance, centre pages of a stitched catalogue need to feature a best-selling item or hero spread. With large catalogues, look to plan in product repeats, especially best selling items with broad appeal, or consumables. Section dividers or stopper pages can be a useful aid to navigate on large pagination catalogues, but they need planning in.

Try to start product sections/divisions on a right hand page. This aids the flow and develops pace. 
 
Planning Product Space
Planning product space is a fundamental part of the catalogue process. With your first catalogue, with order/sales history, it largely has to be ‘gut feeling.’ The good news is that if you are planning a catalogue and you have selected the product range then you should have a pretty good idea of what are likely to be your best selling products. The other good news is that if you are wrong you can measure and change it next time around. There are two general rules when allocating space:

The more expensive the product, the more space you can afford to invest.
Mail order is a leap of faith, and if you are selling expensive items you need to tell a good story to justify the asking price. In the case of industrial products, a large piece of equipment may require a detailed listing of its features and specification. The only exception to this is if you have a best-selling item that has a low price but very high margin-its overall contribution may justify a larger selling space.

A word of warning, if you really believe in a product
then be prepared to experiment with its presentation.
You might just develop a winner!

Best sellers need prime selling space
In the opening paragraph I introduced the concept of heroes and dogs. It really needs no explanation and refers to the performance of certain products; good sellers are heroes, bad ones are dogs. Most catalogues will have one or two outstanding products that generate good, steady sales; these can be invested in and developed with little risk. Eventually with good housekeeping and astute square inch (SQUINCH) analysis you will eventually wheedle out the poor performance products. But a word of warning, if you really believe in a product then be prepared to experiment with its presentation. You might just develop a winner!

Hot Spots
Arguments still rage about these about the use of hot spots and their influence on product sales. All I know is that when carrying out an analysis, ‘space and place’ are undoubtedly key to successful sales. The proven hotspots are:

· Front Cover-featuring a product can lift sales by 25%

· Back Cover-catalogues can land either way up.

· Inside Back Cover-50% of readers flick through the catalogue starting at the back.

· Centre Spread- stitched catalogues naturally fall open on the centre spread.

· Top Right of all spreads-exploits eye-flow.

 
Adding Pace
An addition to the ‘space and place’ is ‘pace.’ When planning a catalogue try to vary the rhythm of the pages. Pace is the way in which a catalogue engages the reader and drives them through the catalogue. A simplistic way to look at this is that in its basic form, a catalogue is a column listing. To add interest to this, type sizes and weights can be varied, adding pictures can further generate, but it is still essentially a listing. Things start to get really clever when you start to break the column grid, vary the picture sizes, add typography emphasis, introductory call outs, vary the size of product presentation, in short-you add pace!