Brand Response advertising is the unique hybrid of Brand advertising and Direct Response advertising. Brand advertising evokes emotional connections and builds brand awareness through carefully crafted images and visual juxtapositions. Think of a Nike commercial – they are not advertising a specific shoe and they are not asking you to visit their site or follow them on social. They are just showing you images they want you to associate with their brand. Direct Response advertising also utilizes carefully crafted images, but these images are focused on the product and the features and benefits of that product. Direct Response (DR) appeals to our rational mind to illustrate how the product is useful and solves problems, often through product demonstrations or customer testimonials. DR always includes explicit calls to action (CTAs) – whether that’s clicking a link, visiting a site, swiping right, filling out a form or calling a phone number – that will drive sales and ROI.

Brand Response advertising marries the best of Brand advertising and Direct Response advertising.

Brand Response advertising balances the emotional and the rational with elevated brand imagery and clear features and benefits and strong calls to action. Brand response advertising builds the brand while driving sales and returning a provable, positive return on investment (ROI). Below we’ll explore the Brand Response benefits in depth to help you understand exactly how these tactics come together to build brands, launch products and drive sales and customer acquisition.

Why use Brand Response as a strategic advertising framework?

There are some significant benefits to utilizing Brand Response as a strategic advertising framework. Brand Response has proven to be an effective and efficient growth vehicle for established brands and an exponential growth engine for challenger brands and direct to consumer companies. Brand response strategy can be tailored to any KPIs or objective, whether that’s launching a new product, acquiring new customers, capturing high-value incremental audiences, gaining market share from a competitor or scaling natively digital businesses with offline media.

Brand Response advertising can produce significant results on a more finite budget.

Using Brand Response, we can produce numerous test spots, post URLs on the bottom of the screen, produce custom landing pages for each product, and enjoy the lower DRTV media rates. Knowing this, marketers can actually work on finite media budgets rather than allocating such a high percentage of their investments to the “great unknown” of media expense with vague results measurement. Let’s say a DTC brand has a budget ceiling of $200,000 for Brand Response media costs. We can get a very clean and accurate test for roughly half of that budget and prove that the Brand Response works effectively to lift retail sales in a dramatic and measurable way. From there we can add additional markets and go national or regional. Once we’ve proved that Brand Response works effectively and drives positive ROI, there’s no reason not to scale. This is a much different approach than general advertisers use because our clients are buying media at half (or more) off the cost of general advertising rates.

Brand Response advertising works well for both existing brands and new products.

Brand Response is a great way for established brands to deepen their market penetration, attract new customers, and/or bring back past clients. It’s also the perfect mechanism for introducing new products in an affordable, quality manner. We’ve seen equally phenomenal results when Brand Response is used for new product introductions. When these new items are hitting the market, there’s nothing like an expanded explanation, demonstration, or visual concept to help potential customers see how the products will improve their lives. This really illustrates the value of Brand Response to introduce new products and simultaneously educate the consumer about what it is and how well it works.

Brand Response advertising allows marketers to maintain extremely high brand values.

Marketers are often surprised at how much more effectively Brand Response enhances their brands compared to the expensive, unaccountable Brand spots that they’d used in the past. By combining the high-production value of Brand advertising and the strong CTAs of Direct Response advertising, Brand Response helps build brand awareness and equity while moving units and acquiring customers.

Brand Response advertising allows marketers to tie their advertising directly to sales.

Brand Response gives companies the tactics and tools to measure, analyze and optimize measure exactly where sales are coming from and what audiences are the most responsive. By utilizing vanity URLs, tracking pixels and advanced (and ideally proprietary) analytics platforms, the user journey in Brand Response can be mapped, repeated and scaled for exponential growth.

Marketers can use Brand Response advertising to unite offline media and ecommerce.

Direct to Consumer and eCommerce companies can use Brand Response tactics for top of funnel awareness target specific audiences on television and then drive those potential customers to the web to learn more. And while it’s not always easy to convince web-based companies to use offline media strategies to drive traffic, we are seeing a higher number of them taking an interest in Brand Response. We expect this trend to continue as the online space gets more and more crowded, and as marketers search for innovative ways to differentiate themselves.

Brand Response advertising works

In summary, Brand Response advertising, when executed correctly, can launch or build a brand while driving sales, leads or conversions and returning a positive ROI. If you’d like to know how Hawthorne’s proven process for creating successful, ROI-focused Brand Response advertising campaigns can launch or grow your brand, please contact us, send us an email or call us and we’ll be happy to show you.