Belinda Beresford
Internationally catalogue shopping is increasingly popular. There’s something seductive about buying this way – you can sit with your cup of tea, wander through the pages and shop to your heart’s content.
There are catalogues for clothes, home accessories, tools, and gadgets – enough choice to stock a home and its wardrobes a number of times over. And, unlike Internet shopping, you don’t have to run up a telephone bill while you make your choices – or wait for the countless adverts to download before you can see the goods on offer.
In South Africa, however, the situation is very different. We have the HomeChoice Innovations catalogue selling gadgets and goodies, those ghastly American infomercials on television, and that’s about it.
Catalogues have never really taken off in South Africa – apart from HomeChoice Innovations, which, by all accounts, is doing an extremely good job.
According to Colin Palmer of the Direct Marketers’ Association (DMA), part of the problem has been the lack of a reliable postal service.
“Up to two years ago, the postal service was very bad, and it became uneconomical to do direct marketing of this nature,” he says.
“I believe it is more feasible now, because the post office is improving. There also wasn’t a strong culture of direct mailing, and a few companies gave the rest a bad reputation. As a result, the man in the street lost confidence in the industry and it’s efficiency.”
Palmer says an enormous effort is being made by people in the industry such as Reader’s Digest, Leserskring and the Heritage Collection to improve the industry’s image. These efforts are backed by the DMA – whose job it is to ensure that direct-mail efforts are fair, honest and of good quality.
Edgars recently made a small foray into this market with a catalogue featuring bedroom and bathroom curtains, towels and linens. The 28-page insert, Style Guide Summer 1998, was included in consumer magazines and Edgars account holders were invited to order their goods telephonically.
Andrew Gardiner, credit director at Edgars, describes the catalogue as “a reasonable attempt to break into this market – but it did not meet with our expectations. We have had a chequered history of trying these things, but there definitely is a market out there. We will continue to chip away at it until we get the right formula.”
Palmer agrees that the market is there. “There has to be a huge opportunity for a really reputable retailer to go this route,” he says. “Catalogues are strong overseas, and when you consider how dispersed we are, with so much of the population living far from the big centres, it’s the ideal situation.
“Marketing clothes in this manner may be a volume thing, because you have to stock different sizes and colours and so on, which means holding a vast stock.”
Gardiner feels that the difficulty with clothing may be “a look-and-feel thing. People go to buy clothes for the way they look and feel, and it’s hard to do that from a catalogue – it may not look or feel as good on you as it does on the model in the picture. People prefer to try clothes on.
“If you look at the international catalogue market you’ll see that clothing is not the largest sector – brown goods, white goods, novelty items, toys, hardware – those are the things that sell well.”
Palmer says that locally the kinds of gadgets sold by HomeChoice, for example, seem to sell the best. “But books and music also do well,” he says.
Gardiner and Palmer agree that while the post office has improved its service, it still has a way to go. Says Gardiner: “When people buy something, they don’t want to have to wait for up to four weeks for it to arrive. When they want something, they want it now. And there is a definite lack of trust in the postal service and delivery techniques.”
Palmer says further that the post office still has to be cost-effective for direct marketers.
“Also, the theft in the past has not been conducive to direct mailers having much faith in the system,” he points out.
“But I believe it will be fine, even though there is still a bit of a question mark on that side.
“On the positive side, our banking system is excellent, and very secure. Secondly, what people need to understand is that a direct-mailing operation is potentially the most honest industry we have, because it is dependent on the current customer for its future markets.
“And any serious marketing person would know that good customer service under these circumstances is imperative.”