VIA Interaction

Monday, February 20, 2006

Disney drops its catalog

Disney is going online only and dropping its catalog. Forrester and others have extolled the multi-channel approach, but Disney thinks its time to go online only.

From By Sacrificing Its Catalog, Will Disney Spoil Its Internet Business? in The New York Times:

"MICKEY MOUSE'S next big role: e-commerce renegade.

The Walt Disney Company, an icon of mainstream America, will move against the grain of conventional business strategy this spring when it stops distributing a catalog that has filled the mailboxes of tens of millions of households for the last decade, and instead embarks on a Web-only initiative.

'Customers almost dictated this to us,' said Paul Gainer, vice president of Disney Shopping, a division of Disney Consumer Products. 'Once they go online we just don't see them going back to the phone.'

The move bucks a trend that has practically become gospel in online commerce in the past several years — namely, that retailers who sell through the combined channels of catalogs, Web sites and physical stores engender more customer loyalty and bigger profits than those that do not."

posted by Tim Beidel at 2/20/2006 01:01:00 AM

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