Direct Response Copywriter on How to Establish and Build a Brand ... Branding Experts Won't Like This ...
/A company with which I’m extremely familiar just completed a re-branding.
I’ve known a lot about this company for about 20 years through various interactions. This company has its roots in the upper Midwest.
It’s not a company with 100,000 employees but it’s still a good-sized company, big enough to employ a person called a Chief Branding Officer.
The CBO just completed a massive re-brand complete with new logo, new colors, and everything that goes along with this process. It took about 3 years and likely cost around $4 million if you include all the new stickers and "stuff" that goes with a re-branding.
They even had a “brand camp” and the CBO was quoted as saying something like … “brand is a journey” … whatever that means.
As a direct response copywriter, I have absolutely zero interest in branding. To me, a brand is simply some type of symbol that accompanies the name of a business. It's a luxury item. People in branding think that branding is what motivates someone to choose one company over another. This sounds nice but there’s little or no proof to back up this theory. It's just plain wrong.
And branding people love their jargon and they love their buzzwords. But they never want anything to be measured. And what about the subject of proof? It’s not even part of the lexicon of branding.
Here’s my advice to you when it comes to building a brand … based on 34 years of experience in direct marketing.
If you want to build a relationship between your "brand" and your customers, then get them to enjoy your product. And to make this happen, use direct marketing techniques … including direct response copywriting.
You can measure the effectiveness of your marketing spend down to the penny with direct marketing and yes, you can use all the pretty pictures and that brand-new logo.
I’ve helped two small companies “establish a brand” as their direct response copywriter. These two companies collectively generated over $600 million in revenue. We never ONCE talked about "the brand." We just went about trying to execute the fundamentals of direct marketing and getting products into the hands of the people who would benefit from these products.
I would bet my car that the great Ron Popeil, who sold $1 billion worth of the Showtime Rotisserie Oven, rarely thought about “brand.” Instead, he focused on traffic, the offer, and direct marketing principles. He ran 30-minute infomercials mostly on late-night TV.
My final statement will make branding types red with rage but I don’t care.
Nobody cares about your brand. Nobody cares about your company voice. Nobody cares about your logo and your pretty pictures. Nobody cares about "brand equity" and "brand authority" and all that other raw, pure guff.
They care about themselves and how you can help them get where they want to get.
Once you help people reach their goals, you’ve established a brand. Want to re-brand? Harness the power of direct response marketing.
The scrapheap of failed CMOs and CBOs is replete with people who believed that branding is "it" and ignored direct marketing. They got the boot when the CFO asked "where's my revenue?" and the reply was, "well, our re-brand went really well."
