In an unfortunately-titled op-ed piece in DM News magazine (“Branding and response are the same”), Young & Rubicam’s John Gerzema and Wunderman’s Daniel Morel discuss the changes to the traditionally-held beliefs of how brand advertising works with direct marketing that have come about mostly because of advances in digital technologies.

Although at times the writing is uninspired and somewhat self-serving (the first third, for example, can be skipped), the authors make some interesting points about how advertising and DM have evolved in recent years. Traditionally, advertising was used as “air cover” or to “soften the market” by marching into the marketplace battleground with broadly distributed messages aimed at piquing the interest of consumers. Direct marketing, then, followed advertising, and targeted those interested folks with offers to convert that interest into actual sales.
Advertising was considered “top of the funnel” and direct marketing “bottom of the funnel” (referring to the purchase funnel). Advertising was supposed to hook them and direct marketing was supposed to get them onto the boat. Advertising affected their attitudes while direct marketing affected their behavior. You get the point.

As the authors argue in their piece, these days there is no such thing as a linear purchase cycle. There is no predictable, projectable flow of consumers from one stage (Awareness) to another (Interest) to another (Desire) to another (Action). Consumers today can go online and research brands and products on their own terms as opposed to those of marketer’s. And they do it much faster than before.

Where I disagree with these fine gentlemen is in the assertion that the two disciplines are the same. They are not. I agree that they are intertwined and that they no longer can work sequentially (but rather must work concurrently). I agree that direct marketing must play a much larger role in the marketing of a brand or product and that the role must be played throughout, not just at the end. But the same thing they are not.

The article discusses new roles for direct marketing (other than the traditional “closing the deal”). Direct marketing can improve a brand’s ability to listen to a consumer, react to the consumer, and learn from the consumer. Direct marketing allows a brand to personalize experiences and respond to a consumer’s needs more quickly and personally. Direct marketing allows a brand to take the conversation to the one-person level. All these activities and interactions contribute to the consumer’s perception of the brand and are therefore branding.

What the authors fail to address (and perhaps this is because they don’t want to get into this
conversation in public) is whether brand advertising per se is needed anymore. In this environment where (a) brand-consumer interactions are multiplied and accelerated, (b) more and more of those interactions are controlled by the consumer rather than the brand, and (c) consumers increasingly turn to peers and other “civilians” for information (and the truth) about brands, do we really need traditional brand advertising?

Traditionalists would tell you that people feel good about Nike or Apple because someone (marketers) told them how to feel. That they are good products, yes, but that all the goodwill surrounding strong brands was started by a marketer showering the masses with messaging painting the picture they wanted to be seen; telling the story they wanted to tell, the way they wanted it to be told.

From where I’m sitting, though, all that and much more can be accomplished by direct marketing, and it can be done in a more measured and managed manner, resulting in reams of actionable data that can be further leveraged in support of the brand. Perhaps that’s what the authors mean when they say that branding and response are the same. But I would say it differently. To me, branding is now just another function of direct marketing. Because doing brand advertising without a direct marketing framework these days feels irresponsible and dangerously disengaged from the real goal of all this money being spent: building the brand’s business by selling more.