This holiday season and catalogs

The Wall Street Journal today posted a story about how retailers continue to rely on unsolicited paper catalogs to drive sales. This is a very important observation for us at CityVoter since catalogs are local, measurable, and image based. They also tend to be themed for geography and season.

As the article points out, catalogs are a huge environmental issue and will likely start to weigh on consumer sentiment and perception of brands. I live in hippyville Cambridge, and as a result, I have already have begun to actively block catalogs sent to my house by using: http://www.catalogchoice.org.

Smart brands and web marketers will migrate some of these direct marketing techniques online and use social media to help. We see this as our local opportunity as catalogs tend to intersect in usage and demo with glossy city mags.