In an age replete with digital strategies, The Container Store looks for results terra firma

They sell empty spice vials, wall-to-wall closet shelving and every imaginable household repository in between. Their image is trendy but affordable, contemporary but practical. And their internet business is growing at a rate of 30 percent a year. Yet even with its inherent appeal among busy, stuff-addled hipsters, The Container Store has a very traditional marketing strategy.

It goes something like this: Do what it takes to get customers into the store, where they can interact with an expert staff.

That “what it takes” turns out to be a decidedly traditional mix of billboards, occasional newspaper advertising, a substantial dose of public relations and a heaping helping of direct mail. In fact, the vast majority of The Container Store’s advertising and marketing budget is devoted to direct mail. According to Audrey Robertson, director of public relations, The Container Store produces more than 50 distinct mail pieces a year.

At a time when many brands are focused – fixated, even – on enticing consumers to their Web sites, why would a successful national retailer turn itself into a micropublisher of catalogues and a champion of good old-fashioned face-to-face sales?

“At The Container Store, we sell the hard stuff, not the stuff that sells itself,” says Robertson. “It takes interaction with highly trained employees to come up with the right solution of organization for the customer.”

In fact, the array of goods and services that don’t “sell themselves” online is more vast and numbered than many marketers had prophesied in the heady first years of Internet sales. It’s a list that includes everyday goods like groceries and more high-end products such as automobiles.

Peter Fader, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies consumer-shopping habits, says even the most pessimistic forecasts of online grocery shopping posited 10 years ago proved to be too optimistic. Fader says that, for certain products, consumers may be hardwired to see them, touch them and then contact a sales representative. Then again, it may be that a decade was not enough time to overhaul decades of consumer shopping habits. Web sites may need to see the passage of another generation before they emerge as dominant profit centers for certain consumer brands.

For now, though, many retailers have had to recalibrate their approach to Web sites and recommit themselves to brick-and-mortar sales. Web sites today are a “competitive necessity” for most retailers, according to Fader, but not the sales juggernauts that some envisioned a decade ago. “It’s like an awning over a store,” Fader says. “You need it, but how much does it really do?”