L.L. Bean

Let's fast forward to January 1, 2009. Mailing catalogs is now cost-prohibitive, due to a 300% increase in postage brought on by another round of postal reform.

You're an executive at L.L. Bean, the venerable catalog giant located in beautiful New England. You just completed fiscal 2008, a year in which you drove $900,000,000 in net sales via your website, and $600,000,000 via the telephone. Maybe you spent $250,000,000 marketing catalogs to your customers.

Take away the catalogs, and the expense associated with them.

Here's a series of questions for you:

• Could you re-allocate $250,000,000 via online marketing? Where would you spend it?
• Do you have any confidence that e-mail could replace catalog as the primary sales driver? How would you change your e-mail strategy?
• Your website generated $900,000,000 in net sales in 2008. What is your forecast for web sales in 2009, sans catalog?
• You generated $600,000,000 in net sales in 2008 via the telephone --- folks who read the catalog, and called a sales associate to place an order. Without a catalog, what is your sales forecast for 2009, over the telephone?
• You had 115,000,000 website visits in 2008. How would you change your marketing strategy to capitalize on this enormous informational resource known as www.llbean.com? How much would your traffic change if your catalogs didn't exist?

Of course, the USPS isn't going to make catalog marketing impractical in 2009.

That being said, if you went through this exercise, could you recover your sales via the marketing techniques that Amazon or Zappos or Blue Nile uses --- companies on the other side of the Marketing Digital Divide?

At minimum, your executive team should have answers to these questions.