Opinion: Brand versus performance can advertising be both?

Replacing a worn out pair of sneakers got me thinking about the relationship between brand and direct response ads.

The idea is that the two should coexist, but neither can serve the function of the other. 

Brand advertising is designed to lift the perceptions of the product or service, and to create mental availability in the minds of customers. 

Direct response, on the other hand, is capturing a sale at the moment of intent. You’re ready to buy and the AdWords or retargeting is served up to guide you gently to the final clicks.

It’s a beautiful ecosystem. Brand familiarity allows for that last click to be justified in our own minds, while the physical availability of serving up in the moment means the sale isn’t missed.

The major distinction between the two is prioritisation. Direct response focuses on short-term ROI, while brand response is a long-term strategy.

It is this balance between now and later which informed the highly regarded marketing text The Long and the Short of It, by Peter Field and Les Binet. In a recent update, they explore the growing tension that exists between short-term response activity and long-term brand-building when investing in any advertising mix.

"The Long and the Short of It explores the tension between long and short-term strategies for brands and businesses as well as providing evidence-based recommendations on how best to approach investment in advertising."

Increasingly, there is a tendency to use very short-term online metrics as primary performance measures, which Binet and Field argue has dangerous implications for long-term success. 

However, as the two schools of thought become more closely entwined, many are now speculating that perhaps they should become one and the same. 

The question is - should they? 

I’m not sure what my signal of intent was, but I was served up an ad for a beautiful pair of white sneakers. Exactly what I was looking for, but I’d never heard of the brand before.

Could that ad or the process have done more in the moment to convince me they were the right choice?

The Long

Brand marketing is designed for customers to see a message many times so it builds awareness and recognition gradually, until the point they are ready to purchase. Building ‘mental availability’ by becoming familiar.

A lot of it is top-of-the-funnel stuff where marketers use emotional connections to hook into our memories. It’s why jingles were so popular, catching in our brains and drawing positive associations with the brand. 

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, one of the finest marketing science programs anywhere in the world says that only about 5 percent of your customers are ever in-market at any one time. The goal is to build mental associations when you do have contact and try to burrow into our customer’s minds so we’re easily recalled when that moment comes.

The thinking is, this brand marketing creates an environment easier for direct response to convert. You already have the association, so it makes sense to choose that last click.

The Short

Direct response advertising, on the other hand, asks the audience to call a number, click a button or take some other immediate action. Lower end of the funnel stuff.

It’s often seen as more efficient, mainly due to attribution. Sales can be directly linked to a click in a traceable path to purchase. 

It’s how Google built a trillion-dollar business. Sales are directly attributed to their world class technology, It’s right there in the title, it’s performing. 

The research shows, however, that sales-driven ads deliver few positive long-term effects. When you’re only fishing in a pool of the 5 percent of your audience which is in-market, it’s going to get depleted pretty quickly with no guarantees you’re going to win the fight for that sale.

What it also doesn’t factor in is the thousands of other messages and influences which impact a customer throughout the course of that journey. The billboard they saw on the way to work. The mention in a story they read on their phone. Their friend who bought one and hasn’t stopped talking about it.

Branding plays an important role, but the problem is, tracking branding is very difficult. All those messages compiled and filed in the human brain are often absorbed without thinking. Almost impossible to quantify. 

The goal of advertising is to become familiar enough to the customer that they justify the purchase to themselves. Can the last step do enough of that heavy lifting to work?

This brings us to brand response marketing. 

The idea is that it blends the best of both approaches, attracting people with a compelling narrative (brand marketing) and securing their attention with a call to action (direct response advertising). 

The argument is it enables marketers to spread the word about the offering, establish a brand's narrative and elicit an audience response while increasing online traffic and sales.

The Holy Grail, it would seem.

Our favourite profanity-proliferating professor, Mark Ritson even identifies the similarities between the two, “The long and short are not binary. Both, by definition, serve the same ultimate purpose. But they do so at two completely different speeds. Every brand beats with two different pulses.”

Ritson goes on to say that marketers shouldn’t confuse the long and the short with tactical absolutes and any media can serve either master, or both. 

If the media and medium can serve two masters, why not the message?

One thing we do know for a fact is long-term brand building boosts margins. A similar pair of sneakers from Converse or Prada have two very different price points. Our brains will find a way to justify the one we can afford.

Introducing a brand at the point of purchase is like a fistfight, with escalating costs as performance media competes for the final click. Long-term brand building is tipping those odds in your favour, like a loaded weapon and body armour for your brand.

Each is vitally important. Each deserves its own focus and attention.

If you’re competing on price and want to capture that last click, perhaps branded direct response will be enough to convince that in-market buyer to click your way. 

But if you want to get those margins up to higher levels, to build profits that can fund proper growth and investment back into the business, perhaps it’s best for your advertising to serve the one master. 

Back to the sneaker purchase, the brand which has been following me around most closely was starting to pique my interest. They’re beautiful shoes, the ads are nice enough and they look like a good solution to my needs.

The problem is, they cost almost three times as much as the Converse sneakers. 

How can I justify that expense, when I don’t know the brand? Am I being ripped off on the web?

There may be a path where the repetition is enough to build the familiarity to encourage a purchase. But it’s not going to capture the high margins from long-term brand building. We’ll pay more if we can justify it to ourselves. 

And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we all want?

Beau Ushay is a marketing specialist at Virtual Marketing Management. Connect with him on LinkedIn.