Merging of Disciplines not new – It just finally has enough scale to get noticed…
A recent report released by the DMA , titled “The Integration of Direct Marketing and Brand” concludes that the lines between DM and brand marketing have all but disappeared.
So what exactly does this mean? Having spent a good part of my career in direct marketing and direct response, quantitative research supporting the secret that I have been sharing with clients over the last few years really gets my attention. The cat is now out of the bag…well sort of…
Some key findings of the report can be found here. So back to the question of what this report really means when all is said and done. Ultimately what it means is that there is yet even more credence and credibility supporting what a few select marketers have known and practiced all along – direct response and direct marketing tactics, working in tandem with traditional branding, can help to build stronger brands.
This type of thinking has manifested itself over the years, with the term, “brand response” becoming a self descriptive notion for an amalgamated version of the practice. Of course brand response is not the same as direct response – they are two entirely different practices, but more on this later.
Now I must clarify – direct response and direct marketing alone is not enough to build and sustain a brand – witness the current plight of Dell, a piece of business that in its heyday was at the pinnacle of DR advertising. I worked on the business for a period of time and let me tell you, it was science at work. The dynamic model, forecasted with good accuracy, the impact of all controllable inputs (ad vehicle, offer, positioning, day of week etc.) on weekly unit sales. Of course, ROI was the ONLY success measurement. Terms like brand awareness, brand health, and brand equity were all deemed to be foolish irrelevant terms reserved for those who couldn’t stomach the harsh realities of applying what we deemed to be rocket science to data. Ah the “D” word – data…
Data and the use of data is one of the major differentiator’s between direct response and brand response advertising. DR is all about getting a response – that’s it. Response mechanisms such as toll free numbers and url’s along with a strong offer or two are used to illicit a consumer response. The currency of measurement is the “cost per” metric – cost per contact, cost per lead and cost per sale. The “conversion to” metric links all the “cost per” stages together and ultimately ROI is established. The end goal of the data is to help establish a clear and visible link to dollars invested and dollars returned. The data’s only function is to define success through the dollar
Brand response or BR is really about ensuring that essential brand practices are used to encourage a response. “Cost per” metrics are important, but they are not the definitive success metric – sales and brand awareness are. Where DR is considered to be a hard sell, BR is considered to be a soft tell. We have executed BR campaigns where the metric of success was an opt-in email address along with identification of the respondent’s nearest product dealer. Yes – perhaps we couldn’t completely verify how much of our advertising spend resulted in product sales, even in the best DR Campaigns this is difficult to do. However, what we could say for certain was that several hundred people reached out to us and accepted our invitation to have us communicate with them on a regular basis. We now had an interested group of “brand respondents” - time to implement a solid CRM initiative.
