Is There Really a Difference between Positioning Advertising and Direct Marketing?

Written By Ted Grigg

The short answer is no… and yes.

The answer is partially "no" because today's branding advertising sells product harder than ever drawing closer to the direct marketing approach. Few clients allow their agencies to simply position the product. They want immediate and verifiable sales when they spend advertising dollars.

Many general agencies continue to hold on to what they know while moving slowly to blending their expertise in positioning advertising with direct.

DMCG Results

So positioning advertising today moves closer to direct marketing by making offers and featuring products.

In a real sense, positioning and direct marketing advertising have always had things in common.

If one aspires to the idea that all interaction with the advertiser's audience including communications, products, services and particularly customer service work together to build the brand, then direct marketing certainly should work hard to build the brand.

Yet the answer is also "yes" -- there is a difference between positioning and direct marketing advertising because true direct response advertising possesses several key strategies not shared by brand or general advertisers.

  1. The direct marketing discipline seeks to track response for each promotion and evaluate sales based on actual customer behavior.

  1. Testing dominates the direct marketer's thinking believing that through ongoing testing, the customer ultimately determines what advertising wins and what advertising fails.

  1. Direct marketing looks well beyond attitudinal change to behavior change.

  1. In addition to front end advertising, direct marketers focus a great deal of energy on building the customer database looking for front end sales that yield the best quality customers on the back end for the best ROI over time. This is something that general advertisers rarely get involved with and certainly have little ability to track absent a relational customer database.

  1. By taking ownership for churn and long term customer profitability, direct marketers work with clients to build loyalty programs and upgrade existing customers. Again, general advertisers tend to focus mainly on acquisition while professional direct marketers give equal weight to both acquisition and retention.

The bottom line: Brand and direct response advertisers have much to offer each other. And the wise client knows how to allocate balanced resources for both acquisition and retention.

Ted Grigg

Ted Grigg is a direct response strategist who helps growth-focused companies reduce risk by identifying weak assumptions before they become costly mistakes.

Over the course of his career, Ted has evaluated several hundred million dollars in direct response testing across direct mail, digital, print, television, telephone, and other channels. His work combines direct response strategy, acquisition economics, customer analysis, creative evaluation, offer development, and disciplined testing.

Ted has worked on both the client and agency sides of the business. That experience gives him a practical understanding of the pressures facing executives, marketing teams, agencies, and service providers—and of the problems that arise when activity, media volume, or creative preference replaces a clear economic objective.

His consulting work helps organizations examine such questions as:

  • Are acquisition goals economically realistic?

  • Is the allowable Cost Per Sale supported by customer value?

  • Are targeting, offers, creative, media, and response paths working together?

  • Are tests structured to produce reliable business decisions?

  • Are unproven assumptions being treated as facts?

  • Is the organization measuring sales outcomes rather than convenient proxies?

Ted’s experience includes the development of direct mail and multichannel acquisition programs for insurance, healthcare, financial services, technology, nonprofit, manufacturing, retail, transportation, communications, government, and business-to-business organizations.

For a national direct-to-consumer insurance company, he developed a direct mail format that defeated established controls and helped expand the productive use of compiled prospect lists from less than 10 percent to more than 30 percent of total direct mail circulation within one year. He also planned Medicare lead-generation programs for more than 60 regional and national HMO and PPO organizations, with some programs exceeding sales projections by as much as 60 percent.

Ted founded Wyse Direct, a direct marketing division of Wyse Advertising in Cleveland, where he developed acquisition programs and helped launch a new technology product for Seiko Instruments by generating a predictable flow of qualified sales leads for its national sales organization. As vice president of new business development for the Grizzard Agency, he helped broaden the agency’s strategic capabilities and pursue new commercial and fundraising opportunities.

He is the author of The HMO/PPO Marketing Plan—A Step-by-Step Guide, published by Executive Enterprises, and has written numerous articles and conducted webinars on direct response strategy, testing, creative development, and marketing economics.

Ted earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Abilene Christian University and completed two years of graduate study at Texas Tech University. He is the founder of DMCG, LLC.

http://www.dmcgresults.com
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