From its origins as a small business selling plastic freezer bags, Lakeland has evolved into a home shopping powerhouse, with sales driven by 18 different catalogues a year. It despatches thousands of parcels a day, and has expanded its retail operations, with 59 stores across the country. Marketing director Tony Preedy takes up the story:

What sort of cross-media techniques have you been using?
"We use a variety of different channels. With our printed publications we experiment with different sizes and paginations, and we’re particularly driven by the thresholds set by Royal Mail.

We use PEFC or FSC stocks and wherever possible we print in the UK.

In addition to the catalogue, we have website and email marketing programmes. We’ve also recently created a digital magazine for tablets that’s available in the App Store and for Android devices. It’s the equivalent to a 120pp printed magazine.

Last year we also mobile-optimised our website so it serves the website to you in an appropriate form for the device being used.

Other examples include our click-and-collect set-up whereby customers can browse online, reserve items and then collect them from a store that’s convenient for them.

We’ve just opened a new store in Brighton that includes a custom app running on iPads that are built into the store fit. It’s effectively digital point-of-sale. Essentially it’s a test installation for us."

Are there other techniques you intend to use in future?
"We have been experimenting with QR codes but they are a poor solution to the problem and are still pretty small scale. Clearly there is an appetite to consume digital content about products, I think there will be a better solution to this in time."

How did you find the right suppliers to meet your needs?
"From a client point-of-view I have many channels to manage and I seek best-in-breed suppliers in those channels, rather than one supplier who can do everything.

We tender and award contracts to whoever does the best pitch. We don’t use print managers because we prefer to build long-term relationships with the printers we use so that it’s good business for both sides.

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.

What difference has it made to your business?
"There’s a lot of talk about attribution and assigning values to each element of the marketing mix. I can’t get too hung up on each piece in each channel. In a multichannel environment it’s simply impossible to know if a door drop or a catalogue was what sent someone to one of our shops.

It’s futile to try and work out the marginal benefits of each channel. I prefer to look at campaigns holistically."