Brand response marketing provides a seamless blend of Direct Response and Brand Advertising delivered through a single campaign, attracting people with a compelling narrative (brand marketing) and securing their attention with a call to action (direct response advertising).
With the brand response method, you don’t aggressively market your goods or services. Instead, you capture hearts and minds, ensuring that your brand is the first one buyers consider as they weigh their options in the future.
There are some key considerations to consider when looking at the balance between the two…
If you’re new to TV advertising, the need for short-term results to prove the effectiveness of TV may well be more important than brand-building and other longer-term activities.
Establishing priorities for your brand is key to a successful campaign. Business objectives will drive these priorities, so close cooperation between business departments is a must in the planning stages.
To ensure your marketing budget isn’t wasted, track the results of your campaign. For online-based or e-commerce businesses, sales attribution from TV adverts is a powerful tool.
Suppose your media strategy focuses on a traditional Direct Response route (featuring daytime-only slots delivered at a high frequency to drive extensive coverage with some BVOD for targeting steers). In that case, the creative execution needs to support that strategy.
The investment in the media budget will also inform how the campaign is best delivered. TV test budgets can be more limited, which would sway the campaign toward Direct Response rather than Brand Response and Awareness.
If the media buy has a more blended Brand Response approach (featuring all important daytime slots to drive response whilst also including primetime advertising to drive awareness). Then the creative execution needs to support that deployment.
If budget allows, starting with a Brand Response Advertising campaign is a great way to attract people through a compelling narrative. Using emotion and storytelling will appeal to your target audience whilst also allowing you to pull on those direct response triggers throughout the campaign to ensure short-term success.
There are several best practices for driving response in brand response advertising campaigns, with these being the most commonly used:
The bedrock of a strong creative is a well-crafted, research-based brief. And almost the entire process is informed by these three chunks of information.
If there’s a budget and time to do so, we would suggest completing some qualitative research to ensure we understand the motivations, attitudes and drivers of our target audience. A clearly defined audience beyond just demographics will ensure we know how to motivate a particular target group.
We need to know the brand: the brand strategy, the positioning, the market share, the objectives, and everything in between. We need to know and talk about the brand or product like you do.
It may appear not to exist in the resulting creative, but the Brand Proposition will be at its heart, informing its direction.
Toast TV is expert at all things TV; we work on all types of TV advertising campaigns across Direct Response, Brand Response, Brand Awareness and Sponsorship.
We also work across full 360 campaigns covering advertising on TV, SVOD advertising, Social, Radio, Press & Print, Digital, OOH and Cinema. We have experience translating hero TV creative across multiple touch-points to extend a campaign’s longevity and performance.
Another way of approaching the brand vs direct response balance is to create two different executions of a campaign idea. One focuses on brand awareness messaging and marketing, whilst the other pulls on those all-important direct response methods to drive results.
We are a Brand Response TV Agency. We know DRTV and BRTV inside out and how to deliver effective campaigns for areas like travel and financial services, ensuring we’re doing all we can to get the best results from our work and maximise its performance.
Get in touch to discuss Direct Response vs Brand Advertising in more detail and to find out more about Toast.
