Customer Reviews

The Catalog Strategist's Toolkit: Rules, Tools, Forms, and Checklists for Both Print and Electronic Catalogs

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total waste of $60. i can't believe i bought this. i think i'm going to have to "search inside the book" from now on. it's full of information so basic that everybody in the industry would know it ! boring, overpriced book, no offense to the author who i'm sure is an expert and all but probably more on the quantitative excel-crunching side, and even that stuff is so basic in here that you'd be better off just googling the topic. i got burned !

Being a chairman for a small multi-channel retailer (shops, catalogue, and webshop), I try to keep updated on strategic issues relating to this concept.

Thus, I have read many impressive articles from Katie Muldoon over the years on all aspects of being a catalogue marketer. So I knew this book would be on a very advanced level. It surely is!

Katie Muldoon is industry-wide acknowledged for her deep insight into the catalogue business. And she is a columnist and frequent speaker on the topic.

After her industry bestseller - How to Profit Through Catalog Marketing 3rd edition - has been sold out for some time, we needed a new edition. By the way, this 1995-book was even translated into German - the world's second largest catalogue market. A huge credit to her!

Her new Catalogue Strategist's Toolkit book is just that ... a Toolkit. Very much so indeed. I was first a bit surprised that the book was so much toolkit and so little "normal" text on catalogue strategy.

It certainly raises the bar for the readers who can benefit from this book. If you are new to the catalogue business, this book should be supplemented with other books on the catalogue business.

If you are a catalogue insider, then this book will be able to add inspiration into the next catalogue process - in each and every process it requires to produce a printed catalogue. The toolkits are numerous forms and lists and to-do-lists that get you ready for Monday morning. You probably already have your own systems in place, but try to benchmark with Muldoon's. You will probably be able to get improvements in a lot of places.

The book comes with a free CD, which I have just ordered. Usually, you would expect a website and a password. But this is an experienced catalogue strategist, so it should be by snail-mail. But that is okay ;-)

The book promises to also cover electronic catalogues ... and it does try to do this. But Katie Muldoon comes out of the paper catalogue business and her greatest contribution is on the paper editions (the sections on e-catalogues are not bad, but pretty mediocre). In this way, she epitomises the catalogue industry that still struggles to get the e-business fully integrated in their mindsets (by the way, it is the same problem for pure-play Internet businesses trying to capture the competences of a paper catalogue business!).

But since up to half of all orders for some catalogue businesses comes via their website, we need to see more publications in the future on the optimal integration of the virtual and paper catalogue businesses.

This book should be bought together with Jack Schmid's - Creating a Profitable Catalog: Everything You Need to Know to Create a Catalog That Sells. Those two books are the best in the English-speaking world on the strategic aspects of running a catalogue business.

There are books in German that complement these books, such as "Versandhandelsmanagement" by Thieme.

Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business