How Best to Balance Brand Marketing and Direct Response Marketing

Even though Chubbies had an awesome acquisition, for the vast majority of the time, I knew nothing about marketing. This was suboptimal. Marketing was my job. Here are 2 things I learned that would have reduced the mistakes and heartaches I put myself through for nearly a decade.

1/ Long vs short term defined
2/ How brand building and activation (AKA DR) optimally work together.

let's go

1/ Long vs short term defined

- Brand building means creating mental structures (associations, memories, beliefs, etc.) that will pre-dispose potential customers to choose one brand over another.
- It requires broad-reach media, because the aim is to prime everyone in the market, regardless of whether or not they are shopping right now

*Most of the audience are not in the market at the time they are exposed (AKA 95/5 rule). Focus is emotional priming, applicable regardless of whether people are interested in the product. It creates long-term memory structures.*

- Emotions have more impact than messages (which get screened out).

- On the other hand, sales activation is different. The aim here is to focus on people who are likely to buy in the very near future.
- That means exploiting existing brand equity to generate sales right now.
- Tight targeting and rational persuasion works, because these people are more interested in what you have to say
^^ this is where most of us are focusing waaaayyyyy too much of our time and resources

*Brand building is the harder yet more important of the two jobs*


2/ How brand building and activation (AKA Direct Response, AKA conversion ads) optimally work together.

- Strong brands get much higher response rates from their activation channels.
- Firms that exploit activation media well make more money from the equity they've created from their brands (but the equity needs to be created FIRST).
- HOWEVER, the challenge for marketers is finding the right balance between brand and activation.
- Activation effects are relatively easy to measure, because they tend to be big, immediate and direct.
- However, they decay away quickly, and don’t build over time.
- Activation produces a series of spikes.

- Brand effects are harder to measure, because they are smaller in the short term, and there is usually no direct link to sales.
- But brand effects decay away more slowly, and so repeated exposures can cause the base level of sales to rise.
*In the long run (only 6 months!!!), brand effects are the main driver of growth*

*Because the effects of brand building only become apparent over the long term, short-termism results when brands want to see ROI NOW. Short-termism leads to excessive activation, and under-investment in the brand (which leads to long-term decline).*

- Effectiveness is optimized when around 60% of the budget is devoted to brand building, and around 40% to activation.

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This is from the GOAT of marketing effectiveness, Les Binet.

See comments for link to the paper

hope this helps.
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Thanks for reading. If this post was helpful, here are 4 things you can do right now to 

• Get more strategic + tactical nuggets on brand building, 

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• And specific things you can do to build strong emotional connections with your audience: 

1) Subscribe to the Brand Builders podcast on YouTube or Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 
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