When you regularly produce a catalog as solid and profitable as Black Box’s, you’d be wise to cede a fair amount of space to showcase your customer service program – especially when it’s as exceptional as this one. In the Gold Award-winning fall/winter edition, Black Box dedicates the first 21 pages to such features as technical support, FIDO protection (its guarantee), and shipping procedures.
Kicking off with the customer service section also provides a smooth segue to what the judges agreed is a “staggering” range of merchandise. To keep the product assortment from overwhelming customers, the catalog includes a navigational chart at the bottom of each page to point readers to related items. Clearly Black Box is determined to be the authoritative one-stop shopping destination for computer networking products. Offering volume discounts and promoting exactly how much buyers can save supports this mission – and encourages companies to order in bulk.
You might expect the product copy to be daunting and loaded with jargon. Here again, Black Box surpasses expectations. The copy blocks are written in a matter-of-fact, almost colloquial fashion, and the product features and technical terms are explained so that “you can understand them even if you are a novice,” said one panelist. What’s more, headlines such as “Your inter-Lan will sizzle! Your budget will thank you” are entertaining enough to interest even the most technophobic buyer on the corporate purchasing staff.
The crowning achievement of Black Box is its ability, through its balance of creative production, careful design, and customer service, to convince readers this catalog can do it all. So it should not surprise Catalog Age readers – and Black Box customers – that the logo on the cover certifying the catalog’s position last year as an ACA Gold winner will remain in place for at least another year.
All in all, the Black Box catalog is as much a computer networking products reference book as it is a sales vehicle. As one judge said, “This catalog is more useful than a college engineering textbook in helping the techie understand the options available to solve a problem. Combine that with the technical support highlighted on every page, and there is little doubt that this is where customers will turn for networking hardware.”