Branding vs. Direct Response? Nope.

We seem to be having this conversation a lot lately.  Do we do a branding ad or a direct response ad?  Should it be aspirational or something with “teeth”?  It’s a frustrating argument because there is never a winner.  The DR group puts out an ad that generates high short-term response rates, generates a lot of leads that convert poorly and is ultimately forgotten quickly.  The brand team puts out an ad that drives engagement and makes everyone feel good, but doesn’t create leads.

Well, thankfully, Vic Drabicky already gives us his take on this Direct Response vs. Branding battle which he correctly describes as worthless.  I want to focus on one specific area that Drabicky points out and one that a traditionally hard-core DR company has a particularly difficult time getting past.

•Don’t put revenue over the brand. This is a big one, and one so many people miss.  Why do people spend tons of time and money to develop beautiful websites with beautiful photography and an overly fancy user experience, but allow their search programs to have less-than-flattering creative, allow their network banners to end up on seedy sites, and not even bother to make sure their SEO meta data is in line with their brand.

These may be  “direct response” campaigns, but I guarantee you every part of these campaigns has a huge effect on your brand image.

One of our team members often refers to many of these ‘direct response’ campaigns as crack.  They are great for an initial short-term lift, but without the staying-power earned through effective branding, the results begin to erode.  So a new strain is needed.  It gets rushed and short-cutted because we have to have it NOW.  The creative is cobbled together from old ads with varying levels of performance, no one pays much attention to where the banners wind up, and God knows what the SEO impact is.  Complaints start coming in and the response on the next ad is lower, causing us to try hard to make the next one harder hitting.  It’s a vicious cycle.  If I drew pretty internet pictures, there would be one right here.

And branding isn’t without blame here either.  All of the lovely looking websites, advertisements and content can’t do their jobs if there is no call to action.  We can make people feel all warm and fuzzy about the brand, but if we forget to ask the prospective customer to do something, don’t offer them some value to be gained from getting more information about our company or fail to inspire them to action, the job is half done.

Thankfully, we have a team of people that are all well-grounded in both sides.  Sometimes it feels that one or the other is “winning the battle” and behind closed doors we might celebrate those victories, but the fact is the two sides have to work together.  Without a brand, there will be nothing for the DR side to hype, without DR, the branding team will forget to generate sales.

So we work together and try to strike that perfect balance.  What kind of things do you do to make sure your team is giving equal footing to each side?  I’ll save my thoughts for future posts or responses to your comments.

Branding a Direct Response Company

In the last few months, the company which I work for, a stalwart in direct sales and direct response marketing for over 40 years, has decided to make a dramatic shift toward a more branded approach. As you might imagine, this is not a quick and easy process. There isn’t a lot of information out there on branding a DR organization, so we are making a lot of the rules up as we go.

So where do we start? Well our start has been with our voice. Until about 8 years ago, we relied solely on outbound telemarketing for leads. In the mid-2000s, the business took off with the introduction of our first 30 minute infomercial. As the infomercial wore thin we moved in to other hard-hitting DR type campaigns, complete with ticking clocks, lots of incentives, and pseudo-celebs talking about how much they loved the company. None of this built up a lot of brand-loyalty, and has left us with a lot of challenges today.

Now we are a company struggling to find a voice, a personality. And did I mention it is even more difficult since we are a franchise organization with over 100 franchisees each with their own ideas?

So our first big step in making the transition is letting our customers be our voice. Rather than a celebrity or a corporate personality talking about the brand, we are working hard to identify our brand advocates and let them do the talking for us. We are researching who our customers are and trying to find ways to communicate directly to them.

Eventually this new voice will permeate our corporate web site, our online, e-mail, TV and print advertising, our social media presence and any other form of communication we have internally or externally. The journey is bumpy, but our branding team has never been closer and as we continue to make strides it is exciting to see the rest of the organization jump on board.

I will get much more specific in future posts, but I hope you continue to come back to share your thoughts, ideas, experiences and opinions.