Johnnie Boden at ECMOD

At ECMOD this year, one of the most popular sessions was a live interview with Johnnie Boden, founder of the Boden apparel catalogue. If you were one of the delegates in the room, as I was, you were in no doubt fascinated by how candid Boden was about his most memorable mistakes and successes of the past 20 years. What particularly caught my attention during the session was the admission that the company does not measure a customer’s lifetime value—sometimes known as the holy grail of multichannel marketing (part 4, 02:02).

For more on this and other insights into one of the home shopping sector’s most popular brands, check out the four-part video on the Catalogue Exchange’s YouTube channel. In particular, have a look at the Q&A session at the end of the interview and tap into the hot topics in the direct selling sector right now—the problem of free returns, the effects of discounting, and as Johnnie Boden called it, the “never-ending nightmare of testing”. –MT