Seasonal catalogues and brochures are arriving thick and fast at Francis Towers. Some by mail, some have been picked up in-store, and others have arrived inside newspapers and magazines.

In “need to get out more” fashion I find myself studying the different formats and paper types. I note that Boden, for example, has produced an alternative larger-format stitched version of its Winter 2012 catalogue which also appears in the usual perfect-bound format.

Debenhams has gone A5 for Fragrance & Beauty Gifts with a fairly hefty uncoated cover and coated text pages, while Ernest Jones has also achieved stand-out with a slender 12pp portrait format.

Elsewhere, I’m told by print buying chums that some retailers/etailers have opted not to print anything this year, relying instead on, um, emails. I’m wondering how that strategy will work out for them? Poorly I’d imagine.

For those interested in the trends of this multi-channel retailing world, a visit to ECMOD next week is in order. ECMOD used to be “European Catalogue and Mail Order Days”, as I recall, but has evolved into “Every Channel Mastered Optimised Delivered” due to the way direct commerce has changed radically through TV shopping, online shopping, mobile shopping and probably Twitter shopping nowadays.

Print in combination with other media remains a powerful selling tool, and will be the subject of discussion in the conference sessions, which include a session on “Why Home Shopping Businesses Spend More on Inserts Than any Other Sector” and an address from that man in yellow Simon Biltcliffe about multi-channel marketing and print.

The session about channel attribution “How do you Assess the Real Return on Your Investment” should be super-illuminating. I can see why marketers love digital advertising due to the access to fantastic metrics, whereas print can’t always provide such concrete evidence of its impact.

Smart marketing people know that this isn’t something to get hung up about. I’m reminded of something Lakeland (also a fixture on the Christmas catalogue pile) marketing director Tony Preedy told PrintWeek a few months back: “Our view is that catalogues remain a very important part of the marketing mix. One of the most cost-effective ways of getting someone to visit a website is to send them a catalogue.”