A multi-year debate within the world of digital marketing is a correct and optimal distribution of attention and resources to brand marketing in relation to direct response marketing. But the definitions of these two terms are usually blurred: “brand marketing” is often deductively interpreted by marketing teams as “all marketing activities that are not immediately measurable,” and therefore exists as anything that is not classified as a direct response. Clearly this is wrong: brand marketing fulfills a very specific purpose and should be activated for this reason.
David Ogilvy, b Ogilvy on advertising, Dana Brand simulation With followers:
Now you need to decide which ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image Interpretation personality. Products, like people, have a personality, and they can create or break them in the market. The personality of a product is a combination of many things – its name, its packaging, its price, its advertising style, and most importantly, the nature of the product itself. Every advertisement should be considered as a contribution to the brand image. It follows that your advertising should consistently project the him Picture, year after year.
Expanding this framing of the brand image, can be defined Brand marketing Like any activity that imprints on a consumer a personality of a particular brand. The purpose of brand advertising, with this in mind, is to differentiate one brand from another so that consumers prefer it when faced with the choice. B Mobile brand capitalI discuss the concept of brand capital, which is the quantified value of a brand, measured across two vectors of impact on the consumer: 1) a brand’s ability to charge a price premium based on consumer familiarity and absorption capacity, and 2) the brand’s amplification of a company’s advertising activity A kind of advertising effectiveness premium).
Direct response marketing is a completely different enterprise from brand marketing and fulfills a different purpose. Direct response marketing is done almost exclusively through digital advertising for digital products, and its purpose is to stimulate an urge on the part of the consumer to immediately purchase the product or engage in it in another way. Ideally, this opportunity is guided by targeting the audience and intentions so that the advertisement conflicts with a need or desire for a suitable time and leads to a result for the advertiser (referred to in the advertising jargon conversion).
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The promise of brand marketing is that by creating a presence of consciousness within a consumer for a particular product, the purchase of that product becomes normal at a certain rate; For example, whenever a consumer is looking for new shoes, he is the default for a particular brand because of some affinity to it fostered through brand advertising (and of course, satisfaction with the product). The promise of direct response marketing is that given skilled targeting, it can generate a purchase instantly, take advantage of existing demand and create the opportunity for the consumer to engage in the product.
Recognizing these different goals often causes conceptual definitions to break down or blur within organizations. These two tactics – brand marketing and direct response marketing – can be integrated into a broader performance marketing strategy that implements a targeted measurement framework for advertising expenses and other marketing activities to derive an estimate of profitability (or, at the very least, measure profitability and overall performance In retrospect). This is the simple essence of performance marketing: it is a binding approach, based on a measurement framework.
I try to broadly characterize performance marketing in What is performance marketing? With:
In my opinion, performance marketing is a commercial framework for running marketing campaigns that requires a quantitative allocation of their measured or upright value. In other words: performance marketing dictates that every dollar invested in a marketing campaign should be attached to a clearly understandable, evaluable and measurable goal. The tools and processes used to run this framework may be industry or even individual firm specific, but the general operating principles and stated marketing objectives will be the same: that some reliable marketing campaign assumptions are used to announce the construction and deployment of this campaign and then evaluated and modified with performance data.
What mainly causes confusion that leads to inappropriate investments, poor incentives and structural inefficiencies within marketing organizations is the perception that brand marketing and performance sit at the same hierarchical height. But they are not; While a brand can be considered as an alternative strategy to direct response marketing, it is not the complete opposite of performance marketing. Brand marketing and performance are not both taxonomic categories; Performance marketing is a category, and brand marketing is a tactic that can sit in a performance marketing category.
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As I have argued numerous times, the misconception that brand marketing stands in contrast to performance marketing creates a mismatch and confusion that can cause a brand function to coexist with a performance marketing team. Optimally, the brand function should sit within the performance marketing team and be guided by a unified measurement model. Again: There is no “reverse” approach to performance marketing. Every marketer should be informed by measuring performance.
Even more confusing to the organization of this hierarchy is the reality of a third executive marketing tactic: Delayed Reaction Marketing. If direct response marketing attempts to generate a response from a user immediately, delayed response marketing attempts to generate a response at some point in the future where an immediate response is impractical.
The canonical example of marketing with a delayed response is a billboard or bus stop advertisement for a digital product like an app: the consumer exposed to this ad may not be able to open his phone or laptop and start interacting with the advertised product immediately. , But the ad is intended to provoke this behavior as soon as the consumer can.
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The conceptual differences between direct response marketing, delayed response marketing and brand marketing lie in the intended results:
- Direct response marketing strives to accelerate the consumer’s interaction with a product immediately;
- Marketing with a delayed response strives to accelerate the consumer’s interaction with the product As soon as possible;
- Brand marketing strives to increase the likelihood of the consumer engaging in a product Next time you are presented with the opportunity to do so.
These differences relate to intention and proactivity. And this is ultimately the essence of the digital strategy for digital products: brand marketing should be the dominant strategy for a product, like a CPG product, when the purchase is made in a retail environment on a timeline dictated by the consumer. Take here, for example, the pace of buying groceries: the consumer determines that there is a need (empty cupboard) and travels to a shop window (grocery store or grocery app) and is faced with several options for specific products (milk). , Cereals, etc.) for which brand simulation may influence the purchase decision. In this case, brand marketing is the only appropriate way to motivate a purchase given a competitive landscape for a commodity category.
Now consider a digital product as an app. Unlike grocery shopping, visiting an app store for the purpose of discovery is simply not a routine habit for most consumers – there is no fixed and normal pace for opening an app store. Also, the “showcase” for apps is a competitive environment where thousands of potential options compete for the consumer’s attention. The purchasing environment of digital products is much different from the retail environment of CPG products; The main means of stimulating digital product purchases is direct response marketing, followed by delayed response marketing, where brand marketing serves as a support system to accelerate the performance of these two tactics.
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The misclassification of brand marketing as a general marketing strategy for a company rather than a tactic deployed in the context of performance marketing can become problematic in a number of ways. The first is that the brand function, which sees itself as the dominant motivator of marketing activities, is becoming very rigid in what it allows to use creative assets for digital advertising campaigns. The impact of this control can be inhibiting: the brand team rejects any experimental or exploratory creative idea for use in advertising campaigns in direct response on the basis that they are not “consistent with the brand,” and as a result, spending on digital advertising decreases.
Another potential source of friction is budget access. A brand team, sitting outside the Performance Marketing umbrella and therefore without measurement and profitability constraints, may steal a budget for using brand building and brand reach campaigns that are unrelated to any performance requirements, so the justification for this cannot be falsified. If these two teams are considered of equal importance, when the brand team actually exists outside of any measurement framework, then budget allocation decisions may degenerate into the “marketing marketing team must prove the need for budget, but the brand team should be given the vendor advantage that brand influence can be measured Only superficially. ” Clearly it is not functioning.
Ultimately, the optimal configuration of a digital product marketing team uses brand marketing as a means of improving the effectiveness of direct response marketing activities. Digital storefronts are completely different, fundamentally different from retail storefronts, and the brand’s recognition and affinity for digital products can be leveraged through the improved performance of direct response campaigns. But building brand awareness and affinity for digital products is a misuse of resources for most digital products: the purchase rate is irregular, dictated by an immediate and unexpected need, and the product landscape is often too competitive to set a price premium (especially since most digital products are distributed in the freemium model). Direct response marketing is the best path for consumer distribution and adoption for digital products, and can be streamlined with brand marketing support.