The Wall Street Journal is carrying a story today called Marketers Still Prefer a Paper Trail about how, despite the obvious environmental impact, 62% of retail marketers said their biggest revenue generator is catalogues.
Admitedly, the B2B space that I work in is very different when it comes to promotional activities than the world of retailing but I was still amazed at some of the numbers in the article. For instance, did you know that more than 17 billion catalogues were mailed in the U.S. last year, that’s about 56 for every American?
Now, in contrast to the retailing model described in the article, I’ve always worked in a high-tech, B2B environment. As such, I regularly argue that we should be shunning printed sales collateral in favour of electronic versions. And I’d love to tell you that that was because of deeply held environmental concerns but the truth is
Andrew Carrier
InMarketing 