Going to Disneyworld

Oh, these Mickey Mouse operations:

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.
...
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.

Many online retailers lack the means to open traditional stores, so this so-called multichannel approach has been beyond their reach. But they still have the photos, call centers and warehouses needed to put together a decent catalog operation.

Why catalogs? Simple, executives say: they're pretty. Unlike most other advertising media, catalogs are something customers want to cozy up with on the couch and browse, sans mouse. Partly on the strength of that idea, companies like RedEnvelope, Ice.com, Amazon and eBay, among many others, have gotten behind the concept and distributed catalogs in recent years.

But useful as they may be, Mr. Gainer said, catalogs were simply not ringing the registers as loudly. Disney spent $18 million to mail 30 million catalogs last year — half of them sent in the holiday season. The holiday mailing went to similar groups as the previous year's did, yet Disney had a 45 percent drop in phone orders. The number of customers who responded to e-mail and other online marketing messages, meanwhile, skyrocketed.

They seem to miss the essential point of multichannel marketing, which is that different channels drive others. For example, they seem to assume that print catalogs only stimulated phone orders. Print catalogs can--and, in my case at least, often do--drive Web ordering, too.