The Facts & Figures

Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM

1. Let your fingers do the shopping

   Stores magazine's (www.stores.org) “Favorite 50 online retailers” is a list of e-commerce Web sites as ranked by the consumers who use them. BIGresearch (Worthington, OH) asked two open-ended, write-in questions about online shopping to a universe of 7,675 consumers:

   • Was your catalog printed on an offset press?

     What Web site do you shop at most often for apparel items (clothing, shoes, accessories, etc.)?

   • What Web site do you shop at most often for non-apparel items (electronics, home decor, etc.)?

   No merchants' names were listed or suggested; respondents came up with the answers on their own. Retailers were ranked in order of total mentions. Here are the top 10 retailers:

   1. Amazon
   2. eBay
   3. Wal-Mart
   4. Best Buy
   5. JC Penney
   6. Target
   7. Kohls
   8. Overstock.com
   9. Google
   10. Sears
2. Double-digit growth for online retailers

   Non-travel online retailing reached
   $170 billion
   in the United States last year, according to Shop.org. Sales for 2007 are on track to reach $200 billion for the year. Non-travel online retail sales volume is expected to continue to grow at a 12 percent compound annual growth rate well into the next decade.

3. Say ‘cheese’

   In a recent camera phone study completed in Japan by The Mobile Imaging and Printing Consortium (MIPC), more than 40 percent of respondents indicated that they have printed out photos taken on their camera phones. Among working women and grandmothers print rates were particularly high, with more than 50 percent in each group printing photos taken with a camera phone.

   More than 50 percent of respondents reported that they make use of their camera phone function “several times per week.” Among female high school students, the number who used the camera function of their mobile phones every day was particularly high (20 percent).
   Source: www.mobileprinting.org

4. More ads on MySpace

   The Interactive Advertising Bureau's (IAB) online research arm, eMarketer, estimates that advertisers will spend $900 million on social networking sites in 2007, increasing to $2.5 billion in 2011. Marketers hope that brand messages will spread virally from friend to friend, providing an exponential effect on these platforms.

   eMarketer further predicts that MySpace will continue to dominate social network advertising revenues with $525 million in 2007, moving up to $820 million in 2008, a 65 percent increase. Facebook's ad revenue is expected to grow faster than that of MySpace with a 72 percent increase from $125 million in 2007 to $215 million next year.

   Some advertisers, however, are hesitant to associate their brands with largely unregulated content that might be offensive or even illegal. At a 2006 Advertising Research Foundation (www.thearf.org) panel discussion, for example, six speakers representing major advertisers and ad agencies indicated they're taking a cautious approach.

5. What shoppers see

   POPAI, The Global Association for Marketing at Retail, announced the first findings from studies pioneered by the Marketing At Retail Initiative (MARI). This study was conducted in the United Kingdom at Morrisons and ADSA/Wal-Mart stores.

   Researchers found 534 shoppers enter the store per hour; shoppers are exposed to 1.6 pieces of marketing materials per second as they navigate the stores; shoppers' eyes are drawn to 17.8 percent of the marketing materials. Walk-around displays, table units and revolving floor displays were the most seen display types. The ongoing project incorporates the use of technology such as small cameras and video software to quantify levels of consumer involvement.
   Source: www.popai.com; photo courtesy of Wal-Mart

6. Interactive ad revenues are on the rise

   In 2007, Q3 interactive advertising revenues exceeded an estimated $5.2 billion, according to data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC.

   That's a $1.1 billion or
   25%
   increase compared to interactive advertising revenues in the third quarter of 2006. The IAB reported that interactive advertising revenues increased 3 percent since the second quarter of this year.

   Revenues for the first nine months of 2007 totaled $15.2 billion, up nearly 26 percent compared to the first nine months of 2006, according to the IAB.
   Source: www.iab.net

7. You're not the boss of me

   Three-quarters of employees say they are equally productive when their boss is away, while another 23 percent say they work harder when the boss is out, according to a recent ComPsych “Tell It Now” poll. Those among the 23 percent report being “able to work without distraction.” Only two percent of survey participants report getting less work done while the boss is away. See hr.cch.com.

8. How's your handwriting?

   Remember the Palmer Method? In our modern keyboarding era, cursive writing is seldom seen. When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just
   15%
   of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. Most students used block letters.
   Source: www.washingtonpost.com

   • Do you have an interesting fact & figure to appear here?
     Send them to Katherine O'Brien at KOB@americanprinter.com.

9. Everybody loves greeting cards

   According to the Greeting Card Assn. (GCA) (Washington, DC), U.S. consumers purchase approximately 7 billion greeting cards each year, generating nearly $7.5 billion in retail sales. More than 90 percent of all U.S. households buy greeting cards, with the average household purchasing 30 individual cards in a year.

   The association further reports the average person receives more than 20 cards per year, about one-third of which are birthday cards. Greeting cards range in price from 50 cents to $10, although counter cards typically cost between $2 and $4. Cards featuring special techniques, intricate designs and new technologies are at the top of the price scale.

   Did you know?

   There are two categories of greeting cards: seasonal and everyday. Total card sales are split almost evenly between the two.

   The most popular everyday cards are birthday (60 percent), anniversary (8 percent), get well (7 percent), friendship (6 percent), and sympathy cards (6 percent).

   The most popular seasonal cards are Christmas (60 percent), Valentine's Day (25 percent), Mother's Day (4 percent), Easter (3 percent), and Father's Day (3 percent) cards.

Source: www.greetingcard.org; photo courtesy of Greeting Card Assn.

Offest was the top printing process used by catalogers responding to Multichannel Merchant's 2007 benchmark survey on print, production and paper.

Forty-six percent of survey respondents print their catalogs via offset. Just 5 percent print catalogs via gravure, while 10 percent say they use both offset and gravure. A surprising 35 percent of respondents said that they do not know how their catalogs are printed.

Twenty percent of respondents say they spend an average of less than $1 per copy to print and bind catalogs, excluding creative and postage costs.

Nearly 40 percent of respondents say they comail — the process of merging catalogs that have already been bound into one mail stream.

Just 25 percent say they are cobinding, a process that enables catalogs with the same trim size to be commingled into the same mail stream.

Catalogers continue to use their printers for more than just printing services. Almost half (47 percent) of the respondents say they received postal consulting assistance from their primary printers, and 45 percent look to their printer for paper consulting/buying assistance. Given the magnitude of the recent postal rate hike, the printer postal experts must have been busy!
Source: www.multichannelmerchant.com