Posts Tagged ‘direct marketing’

General image marketing is…

• a General Motors’ TV “corporate” commercial showing several of their cars in a beautiful field of flowers… With a happy looking family having a barbecue in the middle of the field. It doesn’t really cause anyone to take direct action and buy a car now, it is just supposed to give you a good feeling about general motors in general.

Direct response marketing is…

• a TV commercial from the local General Motors dealer telling you all about the July 4th super sale… special prices, super low payments, additional options added at no charge during the sale period only. This type of advertising causes people to actually flood into the dealership and actually want to buy the dam car right now. This commercial is not overly pretty, no fields of flowers, just straight talk about what you can get, and why it is to your advantage to buy it now.

The direct response ad is what actually brings in floods of money into the dealership.

The general image ad doesn’t make any real money for anyone except the ad agency that produces it.

The advertising world has many annual awards that they give out to ad agencies. When an ad agency wins an award for an image ad or campaign that they created… the people in the winning agency all go around “high fiving” each other in the office and at industry trade events for months… The award sits in a showcase in their lobby… it is their badge of achievement… however, research shows that most image ads that win creative awards FOR THE AGENCY… turn out to be a total non productive bomb for the poor client that actually paid for it all.

Each side of the coin seems to have a different set of values that they call winning. The purpose of today’s post is to help business owners differentiate between dollars that can be quantified and not when planning advertising or public relations budgets.