Tom Rosenbauer is vice president of mail order for Manchester, VT-based Orvis, a cataloger/retailer of outdoor sporting goods. An avid outdoorsman, he has eight books on fly-fishing in print.
Being in love with your product may exacerbate some basic direct marketing hazards
Are you a “passion marketer”? In other words, are you truly passionate about the products you sell and the services you provide, in your personal as well as your professional life? I am, and I can tell you that passion marketing is a blessing — and sometimes a curse.
Here’s a test to determine if you are a passion marketer: On a quiet Sunday when you have a few hours to yourself, do you play with the same products you sell in your catalog? Working for the Orvis Fly Fishing and Sporting Tradition catalogs for 10 years, I find I simply must go fly-fishing Sundays or on my lunch hours in streams near our offices. I doubt if you’d find the owner of an office supplies catalog larking about with staplers.
Passion marketing usually revolves around a hobby, an interest, or a sport. And boy, is life tough for those of us “forced” to slog away in the trenches doing what we love to do. Bill Parks, founder of paddlesports equipment cataloger Northwest River Supplies, probably spends long hours discussing the latest in hull designs with other river rats. Todd Green of HeadRoom.com, a manufacturer/marketer of music equipment, no doubt must listen to music on $12,000 headphones when he’s not helping fellow audiophiles pick out the products they need to fulfill their dreams.
People typically envy passion marketers because day in and day out, we’re working with a catalog selling products we love and with people with whom we share a common bond. But it’s not all fun and games. For one, being in love with your products may exacerbate some basic direct marketing hazards. But you can take steps to ensure that your business is not consumed by your passion:
• Size up the market.
It’s a fundamental issue, but marketing something you love can be taking a leap of blind faith. Consumers, suppliers, and marketers invariably believe a business based on a hobby or a sport is bigger than life. But some pastimes are highly visible in the media and overreported in surveys, which may lead you to falsely conclude that the market is larger than it is, and also may also make it more difficult to identify your true customers.
For instance, a person who cross-country skied on a vacation 10 years ago might consider himself a participant in the sport, but that doesn’t mean he’ll ever buy a pair of skis. Consumer demand for such products requires active and continuing participation, as these pastimes place prohibitive demands on time and money. And the dropout rate may be quite high as these consumers lose interest.
The rapid emergence — and failure — of catalogs for women fly-fishers in the early 1990s is a classic example of passion overriding math. In the 1970s, one fly-fisher out of 100 might have been a woman. But after the 1992 release of the movie A River Runs Through It, which depicted fly-fishing in rural Montana, the sport’s popularity grew, and the demographics of fly-fishing skewed younger and more affluent — and included more women. Several companies, such as Damsel Flies, rushed to capitalize on this trend by launching catalogs targeting female anglers.
But while demographic studies indicate there are 10 million fly-fishers in the U.S., the number of active participants is closer to about 2 million. So where there had been a 1% participation among women 20 years ago, today female fly-fishers may be somewhere closer to 5% of participants. Now figure that 25% of these 100,000 active female participants are mail order buyers. Since you’d probably be happy with a 1% response on a new venture, you can expect about 250 orders — a far cry from the warehouse full of product your investors have paid for.
• Strive for authenticity.
The platitude “sell the sizzle with the steak” must be painfully authentic in passion marketing. Customers of passion marketers — who typically know their sport or hobby inside and out — are far more demanding of authenticity. You can load the wrong size staples into a stapler for a photograph and no one will notice or care. But try showing a river rafter holding a paddle in a clumsy manner or a fishing rod upside down in one of your beauty shots, and you’ll get heat from angry enthusiasts. Worse yet, you may lose credibility.
What’s more, while it’s tempting to establish your company’s credibility in a passionate market by relying on beauty shots or editorial content that relates to the activity, successful marketers agree that editorial alone doesn’t establish credibility or impart your passion to customers.
HeadRoom.com, for instance, packs plenty of information on personal audio into its Website and catalog, but president Tyll Hertsens still feels his most difficult task is to convey the true benefits of his products to customers: “I can talk all day long about our amp and processor, but people have to have one for a couple of months before they begin to appreciate the performance so much that when you take it away they cry. And what I really want is for them to cry because they don’t yet have one.”
One way to inspire consumers to buy your products is by using compelling lifestyle photography. At Orvis we spend three times as much effort finding and critiquing lifestyle images as we do product photography. Because we’re marketing a specialized product that provokes strong emotions from our customers, we have to stay away from stock photo houses because most of the fly-fishing images available there are clichés. So we buy images from photographers who specialize in fly-fishing, or we assign a photographer to go on location to get the powerful shot we want. For example, a recent Orvis photo shoot took place off the Gulf Coast, featuring fishing guides who typically wear Orvis clothing. The lifestyle or beauty shot can thus be the most expensive image on a spread. For instance, a cover can cost $3,000-$4,000 for a one-time use.
• Educate your audience.
Sure, compelling lifestyle photography can entice consumers. But in striving to portray the fervor of a hobby or a sport, we often forget that our products have inherent glamour and excitement. Informational charts, detailed product editorial, and educational material, if thoughtfully crafted with the customer’s buying needs in mind, can be as sexy as photos of huge trout or kayaks running Hell’s Canyon. With its exhaustive copy and exhaustive charts detailing every product feature, the consumer electronics cataloger Crutchfield does perhaps the best job I’ve ever seen at educating customers about complicated products in order to help them make decisions.
• Stand back when selecting products.
For most catalog products, emotional attachment is limited to product developers. For instance, when a blouse in an apparel catalog doesn’t contribute to the bottom line, the merchandiser slashes it, the art director deletes the image, the product carries its price in big red numerals the next time it appears, and only the designer of the blouse sheds a few tears. In contrast, with passion marketing, sometimes every member of the merchandising/design crew is a zealous enthusiast.
If the staff were to categorize themselves as consumers, they would most likely fall into the “extreme user” group, which may color their judgment when making product selections. This can be an obstacle, considering that the most profitable customers are typically novice users who are still acquiring the basics. The challenge is therefore to strike a balance — to maintain authenticity and cutting-edge appeal while still bulking up on the profitable basics. HeadRoom.com projects authenticity “by actually being authentic and assuming people will figure it out for themselves over time,” Hertsens says. In other words, the company sells product it believes in — technical or not — and doesn’t neccessarily cater to a general audience.
But Northwest River Supplies takes a different approach. “There is tension in the company between those who want to include products for competitive reasons even if they are not very profitable and those who would like to limit our catalog coverage of nonexclusive products,” says Parks.
We confront similar problems at the Orvis Fly Fishing catalog, with pleas to maintain unprofitable products coming from all points of the compass. Let’s say the favorite fly rod of our chairman didn’t break even. The hat with 10 pockets sewn into it, championed by our CEO, was a complete disaster. And the oversize boat net was a big hit with professional fishing guides, but they’re a tiny minority of our customers, and most of them buy such products at deep discounts.
My job as catalog director is to take the hard-nosed view, with the needs of the customer and the goal of profitability taking precedence over my personal inclinations. Is the fly rod the chairman loves an essential part of our offering, or do we sell other rods that accomplish the same thing — and are more popular with customers? Do people think the hat’s silly look overrules its usefulness? Can we take the boat net out of the catalog and just put it in a guide newsletter, thus saving costly square inches for a product that appeals to all fly-fishers? Or does keeping the boat net in the catalog add cachet and credibility to our line?
• Choose your staff wisely.
Staffing a passion-marketing team also adds complexities, since the specialized nature of the product narrows eligible candidates more than in other catalog businesses. At HeadRoom, Hertsens says, at the very least his salespeople, chief marketing person, and copywriter must have a passion for the product.
Northwest River Supplies is more interested in hiring people with a dedication to the customer. “We try not to confuse a passion for river running with a passion for working in a river equipment company,” Parks says. “We are looking for people with a passion for going the extra mile for the customer.”
At Orvis, my approach is to hire people with a passion for the products and the customers in every area that touches the buyer. That includes copywriters, art directors, product developers, and lead customer service staff. Depending on your product niche, you may be dealing with tiny markets with tough competition and highly demanding customers.
On the other hand, I prefer that not everyone on the catalog team is a high-end user of the merchandise. For instance, both the art director and the production director on the Orvis Fly Fishing catalog are passionate but not overly technical fly fishers. Consequently, they are invaluable in questioning a product’s usefulness to the novice and lending some perspective to the more passionate marketers among the team.
Although passion marketing may have its challenges, I can attest that it’s well worth it. But I won’t go into specifics about the benefits of passion marketing — too many people want my job as it is.