The Direct Response Approach to Brand Building

Interesting article over at Kissmetrics' blog: Eight Lessons for Online Marketing Success I Learned From Direct-Response Advertising.

Starting off with a quote from Raymond Rubicam:

The only purpose of advertising is to sell. It has no other justification worth mentioning.

He is very right, and this principle can seldom be repeated too often. Many marketers are unduly concerned with ‘building brand recognition’, ‘increasing customer awareness’, ‘leveraging social media’ and all these other fancy marketing techniques. But what is the point of these things if they don’t measurably lead to more sales?

Of course, brand recognition, customer awareness, social media and the like can all be used to increase sales—and significantly at that. But very often, marketers have no clear strategy as to how they should use these tools to bring in more money. Sometimes they don’t even consider the question; they just ‘know’ they should be doing these things…because everyone else is, so it must be important, right?

Add to that that brand building targets non or light users, while the real value is in existing customers.

This duality of advertising for brand building and sales purposes is something I find really fascinating.

This part touches on something essential: advertising should tie to sales, but not necessarily directly.

For more interesting lessons from direct advertising, read more at their blog.