A catalog redo for peanuts

Peanuts are good, and according to the Peanut Institute, good for you. Bertie County Peanuts has been growing and selling peanuts since 1915, so the company knows its product. But does it know how to design a catalog? The North Windsor, NC-based mailer submitted its Fall 2007 edition for a critique. Catalog creative experts Chris Carrington, president of a King of Prussia, PA-based consultancy Catalogs By Lorel, and Kevin Kotowski, president of Torrance, CA-based multichannel marketing agency Olson/Kotowski, thoroughly picked over the peanut mailer's 24-page book. Did they find the design “like butter,” or did they blister-fry it? Read on to find out.

KEVIN KOTOWSKI

At some point, it's a dilemma every niche cataloger, like the Bertie County Peanuts catalog, faces: How do we get more successful without losing the homespun appeal that made us successful in the first place?

The operative phrase is “proceed with caution.” Before redesigning and/or rewriting your catalog, ask yourself if you're making too radical a change for your audience. So, in that spirit, here are a few suggestions to make the Bertie County Peanuts catalog even better than it already is.

The good news: The front cover has a lot of impact. I like what the designer and photographer have done here. The jars — and more important, the peanuts — are up large and they do look pretty darn appetizing; the toll-free phone number and Website URL are easy to find.

One suggestion? Add short magazine-style teasers with page references along the lines of “See our newest VIP gifts on page XX” to drive the reader inside the catalog.

Consider developing a slightly more refined logo/masthead treatment. I'd also like to see a short tagline added to the logo — possibly picking up the “Our secret's in the soil” line from the inside front cover body copy to add some differentiation and to position the catalog against its competitors.

As good as the front cover is, the back cover could use some work. Currently, it consists of a nice photo of a field of peanut plants with the name of the catalog, the address, 800-number, and Website superimposed over the blue sky.

But experienced mailers know the back cover is one of the hottest selling pages in a catalog. Bertie County should ask its printer about the minimum space it needs for its mailing and ink-jetting areas.

It should then use the remaining space to showcase one to three products. You can either add selling copy and price points along with the photos and sell products right off the back cover, or just the name and photo of the product and the page number where the reader can find more information if you prefer to drive the reader inside.

If featuring more than one item, I'd recommend different price points: a lower cost item, an average cost item, and a more expensive item to capture the interest of different “price point” shoppers.

Oh, and keep your phone number and Website address prominent. Lots of folks will look for them here.

On the opening spread, the map, the company story, and black-and-white photo are terrific. I learned enough about the company, its 90-year history, who's who, and why these peanuts taste so good to feel I could trust the company and its products.

I'd recommend a caption under the photo (to identify who the reader is looking at) and a quick recap of the Bertie County Peanuts story. Captions have very high readability and offer an easy entry point for the eye to pull readers in and get them involved.

Since the opening spread is a hot selling spread, consider offering more than one product opposite the inside front cover. Loosening it up to feature a second product will likely give you a boost in sales.

To illustrate some of the following points, we've taken the liberty of redesigning two of the catalog's spreads.

We reorganized the page 4-5 spread (seen here) for more active eyeflow and to use the selling “hot spots” a bit better. Eye-tracking studies show that most viewers begin looking at the upper right hand corner of a catalog spread, so it's a good idea to put a photo there rather than copy.

Then the design needs to keep the eye moving around the spread. Notice how the alternating product presentations on page 5 are visually more interesting than the original layout, which allows the eye to fall off the right side of the page.

Since every catalog spread should have a “hero,” we pulled the Roanoke River Trail Mix to the top of page 4, made it a true hero presentation, and added a ragged border treatment around the photo to give it a bit more interest. We also swapped the current dark background behind the Boiled Peanuts photo for a lighter background to pop the products a bit better.

Finally, we pulled the text about Roanoke River Partners out of the body copy for the Trail Mix, gave it a bit more prominence and added a bug that reads “Perfect Soil, Perfect Peanuts” to reinforce branding.