Everything marketers do must support or build the brand

Building Your Brand and Your Bottom Line with Direct Response™

“Everything marketers do must support or build the brand. Realizing value from direct response marketing requires a holistic direct-to-brand strategy, unless you’re prepared for a new set of problems to emerge.” Jim Warren

Generating sales is still a goal today, but sophisticated brand managers are now using direct response to accomplish so much more than generating sales transactions. They employ a direct-to-brand approach to create or enhance a brand, enhance a company’s image, drive retail sales, and generate leads, just to name a few – all with the goal of developing long-term customer relationships, not merely single transactions.

Direct response built American Express, AOL, and Book of the Month Club, Dell Computer, GEICO Direct, Time Life Books and other well-known and respected brands. These early adopters of direct response technologies, and the brand managers that used them, have sought to differentiate themselves from their competition by building their business models around direct response.

The good news is that already well-established brands can be enhanced by direct-to-brand as well. Additionally, brand managers looking for an innovative way to gain incremental improvements in results with their existing brand will find direct response technologies an ideal fit. Sears, Home Depot, and Apple Computer are notable existing brands that now incorporate direct response in direct-to-brand marketing campaigns.

You see a particular wrench or tool set at Sears, and wonder what on earth it’s good for, and you don’t buy it. But after you see Bob Vila demonstrating its uses on TV, you’re likely to buy it the next time you go to Sears. Thanks to Bob’s advice to visit Sears today, you might make a special trip just to get one.

Similarly, Home Depot now routinely makes special offers via DRTV, and invites the viewer to “Call, Click, or Visit.™”

Apple Computer has run DRTV spots designed to turn consumers away from the plethora of Windows-based PCs and towards a MacOS-based Apple product. The commercials feature people who have done so, and why they’re glad they did. If the viewer is then persuaded to at least consider a switch, he or she can call a number for a nearby outlet, or visit Apple’s website for more information. Sears, Home Depot, and Apple Computer are well-respected brands. Such Direct Response ads enhance that brand image while generating immediate and incremental improvements in results.