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

Comfort and joy

Two diverse organisations, John Lewis and Oxfam, are using online video in a similar way: to encourage us to spend some of our Christmas budget at their websites.

In its enewsletter last week, John Lewis included a blurb about its Toy Joy video, in which "we asked some children we know to give our predicted best sellers a test run, and as you’ll see, they had lots of fun". In the three-minute clip, a half-dozen or so kids play with scooters, dollhouses, glow-in-the-dark light sabers, and the like. It's a cute idea; I just wish that the production was a bit less slick. The kids seem more like child actors told to play nicely than "real-life" kids who jumped at the chance to mess about with toys. One of the girls in particular appeared positively joyless playing with what looked like a pretty fun dressmaking kit.

John Lewis doesn't seem to have uploaded the video onto YouTube, which seems to be a lot opportunity. Oxfam, on the other hand, has a series of videos on the clip-sharing site as well as on OxfamUnwrapped.com. The site sells "gifts that make a big difference"--£30 buys farming tools for a Third World family, £221 a desk and chair at a school in an impoverished community, £25 a goat for a family in need. The print catalogue includes plenty of callouts directing you to the website to "see this gift in action". The video (below) in which a Honduran family shows how the gift of a cow (£80) improved their well-being is more effective than any copywriter's verbiage could be. And if the expression on the girl's face at the 1:25 mark doesn't epitomise "joy", I don't know what does.--SC