Direct Marketing Sells by Disrupting
A popular branding and marketing strategy blog draws conclusions about how direct marketing is the anti-brand strategy.
Some of the blog participants believe that branders seek the consumer’s trust above all. Direct marketers, on the other hand, have no such motivation. They are not interested in people, but numbers.
Numerous respondents to this brand oriented post essentially agree that direct marketers make sales by interrupting and disrupting people’s lives.
How would you respond to these statements? Are there elements of truth here?
Ted Grigg
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Reader Comments (2)
This is going to sound crazy -- but I think both camps are right, although neither knows why.
Here's why: Direct mail often works best when the customer's need is circumstantial. Branding works best when the customer's need is replenishment based.
People get confused because, through special promotions, big brands often try to create a circumstantial need for their product in order to spike demand.
But generally, "brand awareness" and the transactional push of a solid direct mail piece serve different purposes -- like a driver and a putter.
I Like your analogy of the putter and the driver. Others in the industry sometimes refer to it similarly as the push and the pull.
In some ways, the Internet is more of a non-intrusive medium because it depends so much on the consumer to make the move toward messaging. It is almost totally non-disruptive. Whereas direct mail --- and even positioning advertising that works best is disruptive. It intrudes on the recipient's time and space. Some successful advertising campaigns that work are downright irritating.
One successful direct response copywriter I admire who beats many direct mail controls told me once that direct mail that makes you comfortable will not stimulate the recipient to action. In his view, disruption is essential to most successful selling campaigns.