Brand advertising versus direct response

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I don’t know which half…”

Lord Leverhulme, Founder of Unilever

It’s been almost 100 years since Lord Leverhulme made his famous pronouncement, and its logic has remained unchallenged. Until now…

During the course of my consulting work, I seldom encounter a small business owner who is able to quantify with any accuracy the effectiveness of their advertising. They’ll run ads in the local press or trade journals without any clear mechanism in place for measuring their usefulness. In most cases, these ads follow the same format: a photograph, a brief description of the business or product, and contact details. In many cases a budget is ring-fenced for this ‘essential’ marketing ritual, and the same, or similar, ad is run year on year.

The logic underpinning this kind of advertising strategy suggests without continued media exposure a business will fade from the public mind and fall prey to the competition.

But this is to confuse brand advertising with direct response advertising, and it’s one of the main reasons why so many smaller businesses waste their fragile marketing budgets.

Brand advertising has its place. But it’s the preserve of major brands. Brand advertisements are conceived at huge expense by big city ad agencies, and yet nobody knows for certain the effectiveness of a particular ad. OK, the marketing departments’ stats people have clever ways of quantifying market trends as they pan out during a particular campaign, but no one can tell for certain whether X, Y or Z customer bought a new pair of Nikes as a result of the latest ultra-cool ad campaign, or whether they would have bought them regardless.

One thing that Nike (or Coca-Cola or McDonalds, et al) can be certain of, however, is that if they fail to keep their brand creatively at the forefront of the public consciousness their market share will suffer.

But this logic most definitely does not apply to small businesses. By all means run ads, but understand what you’re doing. You do this by applying the time-honoured principles of direct response.

“The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Direct marketing is not a method; it’s a set of principles, and they can be applied in any medium. They were established by visionaries like John Caples and Claude Hopkins in a golden age of mail order in the first half of the last century. Through painstaking trial and error and dogged perseverance, they invented a new discipline. The science of direct marketing was born, and along with it such terms as split testing, headline rotation, demographic targeting, benefits-centred copy, ad tracking and metrics. Sounds familiar? It should - because as well being the basis of effective offline advertising it’s the very same set of principles that underpins internet marketing.