I’ve been contemplating catalogs lately. Mostly, what is their role in the future of retail?

My immediate response would be that catalogues are a great vehicle for branding. More so than any other type of direct mail, I think they elicit consumer response and attention. I remember awaiting the JCPenney catalog as a kid, in the pre-Internet days. Once it arrived, I would make a wish list from a seeming endless array of toys and my parents would do the same for their world of items. Leisure time and lack of options, medium-wise, made this possible.

But now, JCPenney is out of the catalog business (http://multichannelmerchant.com/catalog/news/0928-jcpenney-quits-catalog-business) instead replacing their big book with 25 specialty “look books”. I know I’m not the only one with a “What?!” response to this. These specialty books don't even provide the item numbers for the limited products. Instead they encourage the customer to browse for the product online.

That’s a risk. If I were CMO, I would have a “plan B”. Driving people from a catalog to the web is tricky. It’s critical that JCPenney flows the customer from the catalog to a site that continues the ‘conversation’ (And I can tell you from some cursory research that they don’t.) And they should have a plan in place to address the distraction the customer will encounter along the way, so they better have the right media to speak to all those people they’re directing online. (Again, the few search terms I typed in directed me to the main site, not the look book site.) With revenues of $19.86 billion in ‘08, $18.49 billion in ‘09, $17.56 billion ‘10, I wonder what the end of 2011 and 2012 will look like. Especially after they said “While Penney’s big book sales had been slipping prior to its closure, the company admits that ceasing the big book hurt total sales more than it had expected in the second quarter of 2010.”

Seems to me that segmentation will be key for them— because right now, by modernizing the catalog, they’re reaching out to a new demographic and not fulfilling that promise online where the customer is being directed. And by directing all their customers online, they’re alienating their older, core demographic.