Why do bad catalogs happen to good marketers?
The innovative minds at Canada Post, the Canadian mail system, had a good idea: Take a dozen popular catalogers and feature their wares in a single mailer, which would be sent to homes across the Great White North in time for the holidays.
But the innovative minds at Canada Post also had a bad idea: When designing the catalog, let the creative elements be downright ugly. And let the pages within relate to each other as well as any two randomly chosen countries in the Mideast, provided one of the countries is Israel.
The result is The Lookbook. Or, as the folks at Canada Post oh-so-cunningly titled it, “the lookbook™” — a 28-page mishmash of offerings, ostensibly for the December holidays. And thank goodness the words “Holidays 2006” appear on the cover, or recipients would be hard-pressed to figure that out.
The art direction miscues start right on that cover. The catalog’s theme colors are white lettering on a cream-of-tomato background. It’s a color combination that’s about as un-holiday as one can get, with neither the rich greens and reds of Christmas, the whites and blues of Chanukah, nor the yellows, reds, browns and greens of Kwanzaa. The catalog looks as if it belongs nestled in a first-aid kit.
The white-on-Campbell’s color theme runs through the entire book, in the form of a contact-information banner that stretches across the bottom inch of every page. This hue manages to accomplish the singular task of coordinating with absolutely none of the colors used by the various advertisers. (The art directors who created striking full-page bleed ads for Eddie Bauer, Ben Moss and Cabela’s will probably need to be detained, lest they hurt themselves or others.)
In fact, there doesn’t seem to have been much communication about the look and feel of the book with the advertisers. Each was given a two-page spread, but apparently Canada Post didn’t offer any advice on how to use these pages.
For instance, some feature winter clothes and holiday colors. Ashton Greene, a cooking tools marketer, bedecked one of its knives with a red and gold holiday ribbon. But others, such as electronics marketer TigerDirect, housewares vendor Stacks and Stacks and foundation garment marketer Bra Smyth, took utilitarian approaches. Their pages could have been pulled from any catalog during the year. Nary a snowflake nor errant string of tinsel indicates ’tis the season.
As a result, the catalog doesn’t deliver on its implied promise — that it will be the recipient’s one-stop sourcebook for holiday shopping. Instead, it has a slapped-together feel: “Get your ad pages in, folks, and we’ll tie ’em all together.” Bah, humbug!
And it doubly misses on its promise for being a one-stop sourcebook through a critical omission: The 12 featured marketers don’t include a single toy retailer. I don’t know how marketers were selected for participation — I suspect it had something to do with fees being paid to Canada Post, but that’s only a guess — but as soon as the creators of this catalog realized that toy marketers weren’t represented, they should have cajoled or connived at least one into participating, even if it meant — horrors — giving the space away, either at cost or for free.
If there is anything to be thankful for, it’s that the United States won’t need to erect a fence to keep this treasure from slipping over the border: Canada Post only mails the lookbook™ within the Great White North.
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