Can Direct Response Alone Build Brands?

Following yesterday’s post on ideas vs response I thought I’d dig out a piece of thinking I’ve had in my drafts for a while:

Assumptions:
By brand I mean something that exists in people’s heads and has emotional qualities. I don’t mean a logo like ‘ elephant.com’. A brand has to be something that enables the company to charge a premium vs the sector, for example Innocent are more expensive than PJ Smoothies despite being identical products [Update: the AA and RAC are probably a better example].

By direct response I mean a communication whose main objective is to elicit a physical response in the Lester Wunderman sense i.e. making a phone call, visiting a website, returning a coupon.

So a TV ad with a URL or a phone number tacked on the end probably doesn’t count.

Can direct response build brands?
For the most part, the best you can expect from direct response is that it won’t damage the brand – it reads well, has a charming tone of voice, but it works the left brain and to give it a strong call to action bribes people into responding using an incentive. Because direct response tends to be a numbers game this is as far as appetites for the ‘B word’ go.

In order to function at its best, direct response relies on an incentive or bribe to elicit a response from the person receiving the proposition. How many times have we seen ‘10% off your next purchase’ or ‘£50 cashback’, or even ‘receive a free mug/soft toy when you call us’? It’s here that direct response becomes a dangerous tool as the minute you need to bribe someone to use your product you’ve effectively eroded the value of it as a brand in their mind.

Direct response marketeers will point to the fact that the are converting people who were near the tipping point to try the product, but there’s little proof to show that these people didn’t already use it or would have purchased without the bribe. In fact econometrics constantly suggests that DM is less efficient than we think and PR much more so.

It’s a numbers game – the more you send out the more you get back.
Bombardment – 35-44 year olds get on average 8 pieces of DM every week (Source: DMIS).

The received wisdom on direct response is that you first need the right audience. You then need to hit them with the right proposition at the right time. Finally a bit of nice creative can make a small uplift in response. The best way of hitting enough people at the right time and with the right message is to bombard a chunk of similar looking people and hope that at least 0.5% of them respond to a DM pack or just 0.004% to a DRTV ad.

It’s all about an obvious benefit to them at the right time - but if you’re selling car insurance it could be at pretty much any one of 11 months of the year.

A lot of direct response accepts and even welcomes pissing off the audience. This just seems crazy in the twenty first century, but a good bit of irritation can mean salience and therefore high consideration.

But this all sounds a bit mad when you consider that 99 out of 100 people are ignoring your communication and that is considered a success. And it’s something that the smarter companies have spotted. HSBC have now offered people the opportunity to opt out of their mailings - pretty radical in financial services and the data on direct mail supports this. Ten years ago 83% of all direct mail was opened and 63% was read. It’s now closer to 67% and 45% (Source: DMIS)

The tyranny of the Drayton Bird model
Direct response tends to focus on certain techniques for attaining a response. A strong call to action, an incentive, impenetrable long copy and rational benefits feature in the vast majority of work. Once you step outside of this formulaic comfort zone it starts to get a bit tougher.

Those that are prepared to change things and create distinctive, charming and brand enhancing pieces have to be prepared to take a risk. The chances of the work driving a comparable response rate are slim. However, the rewards are potentially great.

However, it doesn’t work all the time. Brand building and responsive work isn’t formulaic and therefore can’t be produced as consistently.

In other words, it’s much easier to get wrong and so people just don’t do it. Clients and agencies alike.

Where direct response does build brand
There are, however, a couple of exceptions that prove the rule:

Some categories demand that direct response helps to build the brand. For example charity work. Everything Bernardos do has to elicit an emotional reaction but also prove its worth in the number of responses it generates. And it does this without, for the most part, resorting to incentives and other dirty response tricks.

It’s probably the sector where the emotional reaction and the rational response are most closely linked: “that’s terrible – if only I could do something about it – oh I can”.

Automotive also has a link between brand and response but only in direct mail where the most responsive packs are those that provide an emotional reason to purchase. I have to feel that the car reflects me before I purchase, and due to the nature of most manufacturer’s dealer infrastructure, provide me with a straightforward call to action. If a mailing can achieve this then the chances are that I’ll call up and book a test drive off the back of it.

Two of the strongest pieces of direct response work that I know of have both worked on a predominantly brand level. The first of these is ‘Error Letter’ a mailing from Telewest (now Virgin Media) to customers who were still using dial up. The simple but effective use of space and missing words to convey the experience of using a dial up connection was a superb summation of the argument. And lifted response by 55%.

The second piece of work was a letter sent to Mercedes Benz vans prospects with the proposition that a Mercedes Vito van was ‘better built than other vans’. To bring the proposition to life the letter was printed on a thick card stock and so provided a literal demonstration of the product benefit. Research showed that 48% of those who received it would now consider a Mercedes Vito as a result of the mailing.

Both pieces of work are the best performing pieces either client had ever had. Whether they can be replicated, and in particular the Telewest mailing, is another matter.

What about online?
The web is geared towards DR but in it’s purest form this consists of Google Adwords. Whilst incredibly informative, and useful they on their own don’t build the brand. They provide a means of getting to a website which will provide a brand experience and a possible sale. You could also argue that traditional online display when primarily used to drive response struggles to build the brand.

Conclusion
The number of clients who continue to invest heavily in direct response suggests that is an incredibly useful tool. And a review of most agencies DR work shows that they won’t sacrifice brand for the sake of response. However, whether DR alone can build a brand on its own seems highly unlikely. For the most part though the most you can hope from direct response is that it doesn’t erode your brand. And recent events in the banking sector illustrate this.

As illustrated earlier, HSBC have offered customers the chance to opt out of mailings. Banks like Lloyds TSB are looking to move away from the huge volumes and work a little bit more smartly to try and offer customers things when they want not when the business needs.

Makes sense to me. What do you reckon?