Walmart is experimenting with paper catalogs. Yes, you read that correctly. The retail giant that helped drive countless catalog companies out of business is now testing the very medium many considered dead, according to RetailWire. It’s only been a few years since Sears, the company that essentially invented American catalog shopping, filed for bankruptcy. Now, Walmart is discovering what neuroscience researchers have been saying all along: paper has unique psychological advantages that digital cannot replicate.
As someone who co-founded a catalog company years before e-commerce transformed retail, I find this development both ironic and validating. For more than a decade we enjoyed creating catalogs that our customers eagerly anticipated. Receiving a catalog filled with both new and familiar products was a consumer experience totally unlike the always-on, 24/7/365 world of e-commerce. Less convenient, to be sure, but often more fun.
The Counterintuitive Psychology Behind Walmart’s Strategy
Walmart’s home furnishings catalog, launched in August, is apparently performing well for what looks like a nostalgic throwback. The company reports that engagement and impression figures “soundly beat” their expectations, with the catalog serving as what SVP Creighton Kiper calls a tool for “top-of-mind consideration, awareness and reappraisal.”
What Walmart has discovered aligns with neuroscience research I’ve been writing about for years. Temple University researchers using fMRI brain scans found that physical ads cause greater activation in the ventral striatum—the brain area most predictive of purchase intent—than digital ads. This shows a fundamental difference in how our brains process information.
The research shows paper advertising requires 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital media. Brand recall is 70% higher for direct mail pieces compared to digital ads. Perhaps most importantly for retailers like Walmart, physical materials produce more brain responses connected with internal feelings, suggesting greater “internalization” of the marketing message.
Why Digital-First Retailers Are Rediscovering Print
The timing of Walmart’s catalog experiment is particularly strategic. As marketing expert Polly Wong notes in the RetailWire piece, digital targeting through algorithms gives marketers “about a 20% chance of reaching who you want to when you want to.” Meanwhile, a physical catalog can sit on a coffee table for weeks, getting multiple views and perhaps being shared among household members. My own experience showed that orders would keep coming many weeks after the catalog reached the customer’s mailbox.
This multi-touch exposure is crucial for home furnishings—a category where purchases are considered, aspirational, and often discussed among family members. Unlike a fleeting Instagram ad or a quickly deleted email, a catalog becomes what marketers call a “brand artifact” in the consumer’s physical space.
As I noted in my 2015 Forbes piece, paper’s advantages stem from how it engages our spatial memory networks. Physical material is more “real” to the brain—it has meaning and place. This is particularly important for home furnishings, where customers are literally trying to visualize products in their own spatial environment.
Digital, of course, has its own advantages in this space. Room visualizations, for example, can’t happen in a static piece of paper.
The Strategic Implications for CMOs
Walmart’s catalog isn’t trying to recreate the 600-page Sears wish book of yesteryear. Instead, it’s a curated, shoppable experience enhanced with QR codes—a perfect example of making paper and digital work together rather than in competition.
For CMOs, this suggests several strategic considerations:
Reframe the Print vs. Digital Debate: It’s not about choosing one over the other. The most effective strategies leverage paper’s superior emotional engagement and memory encoding with digital’s convenience and measurability.
Consider Category Fit: Home furnishings, fashion, luxury goods—categories requiring inspiration and emotional connection—may benefit disproportionately from print’s psychological advantages. Beautiful product photography in a large format creates desire in ways a smartphone screen simply cannot.
Target the Attention Economy Differently: With digital advertising becoming increasingly cluttered and ignored, physical mail represents what might be called “white space” in the consumer’s attention. One well-designed catalog might generate more engagement than hundreds of digital impressions.
Measure Beyond Click-Through Rates: Walmart’s success metrics included “impressions and engagement,” but the real test will be whether catalog recipients show increased lifetime value. The neuroscience suggests they will, as physical media creates stronger emotional connections and brand associations.
The Pendulum Swings Back (Slightly)
The death of print has been greatly exaggerated. While we’re never returning to the days when the Sears catalog was Amazon-before-Amazon, smart retailers are recognizing that paper serves a unique psychological function that digital cannot fully replace.
Walmart’s experiment suggests we’re entering a more sophisticated era of omnichannel marketing. For CMOs willing to challenge digital-only orthodoxy, paper might just be the differentiator that cuts through the digital noise.
Is your brand missing out on paper’s unique ability to create lasting emotional connections with customers? As Walmart is demonstrating, sometimes the future of retail looks surprisingly like the past—but, with better data to explain why it works.