Catalogue concern as Kmart cans print

Retail giant Kmart is halting print production of its catalogues, becoming the latest shopping giant to exit print, in what is now a growing, and for the print industry, concerning trend.

Kmart is the country’s biggest retailer, and joins supermarket giant Coles in dumping print in favour of digital marketing of its weekly specials. Ovato has been printing the Kmart catalogue.

Kmart originally launched its digital catalogue last August, to run alongside the printed version.

Coles stopped its weekly seven million run catalogue, printed by IVE, six months ago, saving itself $35m-$40m in print costs. Woolworths has just moved a fifth of its weekly seven million run catalogue, printed by Ovato, to an online version, with more likely to follow if the move delivers the results.

Kmart may not be the last major retailer to ditch printed catalogues. Major remaining catalogue users include Aldi, IGA, JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, and The Good Guys.

Kellie Northwood, CEO of The Real Media Collective (TRMC), which includes the Australian Catalogue Association said, "All retailers are taking the opportunity to look at their marketing mix. However, the reality is that printed catalogues are way in front of digital catalogues when it comes to readership and engagement. Our figures show that a printed catalogue that has five or six million copies going into letterboxes will only be opened by a couple of hundred thousand people in its digital format."

Northwood says TRMC is working with retailers to help them optimise their catalogues, and says, "The most successful catalogue in the country is Aldi. That is because the catalogue incentivises customers. Retailers will benefit from using data more effectively, using customisation and versioning.

"Catalogues in the future may not be the one massive run that they have been until recently, but they will still be a part of the marketing mix."

Moving printed catalogues online has knock-on implications for the whole industry, and not just for printers IVE and Ovato, who handle most of the bigger jobs. The Coles and Woolies catalogues use 20,000 tonnes of paper a year between them, the volumes giving paper, inks, plates and consumables suppliers a base platform to operate their businesses from.

The move by leading retailers to pivot away from print flies in the face of research that consistently shows print as the most engaging and rewarding promotional channel. Marketing guru Malcolm Auld called the Coles decision to abandon print, “ridiculous to say the least, and naively woke”, and claimed it had been made by a marketing clerk.

Auld said, “The science of the emotional power of paper over digital channels has been proven. It has to do with how direct mail, for example, makes the content more real to the brain and better connected to memory by engaging with its spatial memory networks. The material generates more activity in the area of the brain associated with the integration of visual and spatial information (the left and right parietals) and the processing of information in relation to the body.”

Looking to the future, he said, “The pandemic has revealed some massive weaknesses in marketing – with poor quality decisions being made by unqualified marketing clerks. Let’s hope the new normal brings back a semblance of commonsense and let the facts, not woke virtue signaling, drive marketing decisions.”

Commenting on the track record of catalogues Northwood said, “We know that 14.8 million Australians find catalogues to be a helpful shopping tool and, when a catalogue is not delivered in the letterbox, we see an enormous increase in complaints from customers who didn’t receive their weekly specials. Who has ever heard of customers ringing up complaining because ads weren’t played during the footy or complaining because they didn’t receive their marketing email? Brands who move away from media channels that customers see as useful in order to gain greater datasets do so at their own risk.”