BUT WHAT DOES YOUR INTUITION TELL YOU?

We all know that square-inch analysis is nothing to scoff at. The best multichannel marketing companies are successful because they build their catalogs and Websites with the use of solid scientific data.

Square-inch analysis, or squinch, helps merchants determine where products will perform the best and how much space to give them in the catalog or on the Website.

But other factors, less scientific and more anecdotal — and in some cases, pure gut — can make you even better at selling product on the page once you have the science to give you your start.

Having the wisdom to know when to apply the non-scientific strategy takes cultivation, and a lot of explaining at times — but it's worth taking that plunge into the less-known.

Logic vs. the way people behave and buy

An essential fact to consider when going beyond squinch is how people behave.

Your analysis says that product A, which is in the “dead zone” of your catalog (the area from the center of the book to the back cover, which is not strong selling space), is doing well and in fact earning far more than the space it's taking up right now.

Meanwhile, product B, which appears on the back cover, has not earned its space at all — it's actually tanking.

It doesn't take a genius to choose to move the back-cover product inside. But it takes smarts and some belief in your gut to make the decision to move the over-achiever from the dead zone into a hot spot.

While its numbers aren't peaking at the level of products you already have in your catalog's hot spots, an item that is performing that well may just shoot to the stars if given good position.

Sometimes a back cover is such a hot spot that it becomes a place to make a statement. This is well and good if it's a statement that people will get, and one that supports direct sales. But this is valuable real estate — and a perfect place to sell your best product. You depress the entire catalog with a weak choice of product on the back cover.

So if your back cover is a reflection of a political decision, it may take some delicate maneuvering to move that poor performer to a less prominent place — or even dump it from your book altogether.

Some years ago I worked with a tech catalog that sold printers and plotters to customers in engineering, architecture, and mapmaking. The company was exploring some new products, including a tablet for drawing plots and plans.

These tablet were a new thing at the time, and there was no evidence that the item would be at all successful. In fact, it was so unlike every other product in the book, it was a huge risk for the back cover, or for any other valuable spot in the catalog.

Management wanted this product on the back cover as a symbol of the new direction the company was going in, but we had our concerns. It ended up on the back cover (you can't win 'em all), and the product bombed.

While the catalog itself was a success, we knew that, historically, if the back cover is strong, the momentum drives sales for the book as a whole even higher. So this meant that even with our strong sales with the book overall, we would likely have gotten even better results had we used a proven best-seller on the back. Even a new product that was more in line with the traditions of the catalog would have improved sales.

Now we're getting into both the fine art and the science of pagination strategy, and it doesn't always follow logic to be successful.

For example, a catalog that's paginated in order of the products' use, which often occurs in the business-to-business world, is rarely as successful as a book paginated with the strongest sellers in the hottest spots.

From there you need to dig down to create a reasonable hierarchy that will get the weakest — but necessary — products into the catalog's dead zone.

Logic vs. easy-to-find

That same tech catalog also taught us a thing or two about logic vs. easy-to-find. For example, our first catalog with these folks included the task of combining its supplies catalog with its equipment title.

Because the space in the original catalog was not used efficiently, we managed to develop one 32-page title from two 24-page books. But we had no idea how to paginate it because the company hadn't done any analysis. And the figures were not accurate enough for us to do this after the fact.