Put Brand in Its Place

Four rules of successful brand-integrated direct marketing

February 2006 By Russell Kern

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2. Build direct marketing plans around ROI goals, not vague messaging or branding objectives. Direct mail should create immediate and measurable action with each event. By generating a lead or making a sale, the action can contribute directly to ROI. While positive shifts in mindset contribute to sales, it’s difficult, at best, to assign an awareness increase to an ROI deliverable.

If you don’t hit your ROI target, future budgets won’t be allocated. If you don’t get your budget approved, your job is at risk. By focusing on ROI, you also will force yourself and your staff to establish proper performance standards for every element of the campaign.

That’s why your direct marketing plans should include different measurements than a typical marketing communications plan. They must set the following targets, which tie into ROI well before creative development begins:

* drop, e-mail and/or call quantities;

* revenue and unit sales targets

* response rate targets;

* closing rate or qualified lead targets;

* target lead quantity, allowable cost-per-lead;

* budget;

* system/lead infrastructure constraints; and

* target sales volume, allowable cost-per-sale.

3. Use the “nobody cares” rule in program development. Product and marketing communication groups become entranced with their products and corporate missions. They often project a level of anticipation and excitement into the product and market. Truth is, the prospect usually doesn’t care. Prospects are busy with their own lives and are all wrapped up in their own products and services, not yours. Most prospects have very little interest in working hard to understand your product. You need to build your copy platforms to address the following hurdles:

* Prospects don’t care about your company.

* Prospects don’t care about your products and services.

* Prospects don’t care about anything you have to tell or sell them.

What do these hurdles mean? Before any direct mail goes out, ask yourself the questions in the first point above. You’ve only got two to four seconds to persuade readers to take action in the mail, and only a tenth of a second online. You must create a compelling reason for them to care and respond.

4. Make your copy platforms, appeals and offers personal and emotional. Build your B-to-B copy platforms and programs around the emotional motivators that lie deep within us all: greed, fear, guilt, anger, exclusivity and salvation. Can you save them time? Can you save them money? Can you make their jobs easier? Can you help them get recognition or reward? Can you help them avoid the next downsizing? Can you make any significant, positive influence on their lives? Or can you help them avoid pain and suffering? Always remember: They don’t care what your product does—they care what your product does for them.

When you apply this concept to B-to-B direct marketing, the basic rule to get prospects into the top of the sales funnel is to provide an offer that promotes emotional benefits. What will your offer—not your product—do to help prospects? If you spend 90 percent of your time creating and positioning your lead generation offers to meet the emotional needs of your buyer—instead of selling your product—you will improve your campaign’s ROI.

In today’s world where brand integration is a mandate, direct marketers must have the knowledge and flexibility to know what brand elements to apply where and when. Because the cumulative effects of making a series of wrong decisions just to support the brand could render you and your direct marketing ineffective.

Russell Kern is president of The Kern Organization, a fully integrated offline and online direct marketing agency in Woodland Hills, Calif. He can be reached at (818) 703-8775 or via e-mail at

russell@thekernorg.com.

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