Nine Lessons for Building DRTV Brands
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By Doug Garnett, Atomic Direct
*Published in Response Magazine, October 2004
Successful branding is alive, vital, and engaging. It is focused on how consumers live and how our products are meaningful in their lives.
But too often, branding in the DRTV arena becomes dead language -- the language of established, bureaucratic brands like Budweiser, Nike, or McDonalds.
In DRTV, nearly everything we touch is new -- whether products or brands. In our world, the arcane language of brand textbooks often hurts more than it helps.
So, I offer the following lessons for building DRTV brands. These lessons have been proven to lead to stronger, more profitable brands. They start at the beginning: with the consumer.
- Lesson 1: Market your brand like a product.
- Consumers benefit from brands. They also make hundreds, if not thousands of buying decisions each week. Trusting a brand helps them make those decisions more quickly and more confidently.
- So, market your brand like a product. Many companies build USP's (unique selling propositions) for products. What is the USP for your brand? Once you think you know, challenge your USP. Does it really make a difference?
- Lesson 2: When your brand makes a promise, be sure it delivers on that promise -- every time.
- Consumers must trust your brand. Consumers will trust a brand when they know it will deliver a specific product experience, consistently. But trust is a tricky thing. It has to be built, and it is easily broken. If part of your branding program is a sales campaign, the product must exceed expectations. In a lead generation program, build trust with clear, useful, factual information.
- Lesson 3: Know your promise and stick with it.
- Ginzu promised a great set of knives for $25. George Foreman promises quick & easy meat with less fat. ProActiv promises acne treatment that works. Never lose your promise through brand extension and superfluous add-ons. Smart fitness companies, for instance, rarely mix aerobics and strength training in the same brand. Keep your brand focused, and your messages about that brand simple.
- Lesson 4: Plan how you'll profit from your brand.
- When a consumer trusts your brand, they'll buy future products with less marketing effort. Or, they'll pay higher prices. Or you'll get better retail buy-in. Or all three. They may even refer their friends to this "great new" product they've just had such a good experience with.
- Know what your consumers want as well as their buying habits, so you can put plans in place to maximize the value of your branding efforts.
- Lesson 5: Expand your vision of what a brand is.
- Evaluate every possible aspect of your customers' contact with your products and your brand, for consistency and focus.
- Many of my biz-school students arrive thinking a name is a brand. But a brand name is merely a label. The true brand is the sum of each consumer's experience with the product, the company, and the category. Even your telemarketing campaign can contribute to better branding -consumers won't trust the brand if they had a bad experience during their 3 minutes with your telemarketer.
- Lesson 6: Be patient and use small steps consistently, as you build your brand over the years.
- Don't expect it to happen over night. Plan for three to five years of brand effort before you see dramatic profitability from branding.
- During this time, don't waste money on expensive "branding" spots. Add brand consistency to your everyday advertising so consumers learn your promise and product together. Then over-deliver -- day in and day out. When you least expect it, you'll discover that you've built a brand powerhouse.
- Lesson 7: Develop a consistent, creative, marketing strategy for your brand.
- Consumers need years of consistency in order to learn about a brand. What consistent elements build the brand? A look? A feel? A sound? What is your equivalent of MacDonald's golden arches?
- Don't trust DRTV producers to manage your creative marketing strategy. Guthy-Renker hires producers to create their infomercials. They usually guide them to do smart brand work. But the producer for the Pilates show has projected four different Daisy Fuentes personalities. And some of the graphics make the show look like it's for Ron Popeil's pocket fisherman. Why are they un-doing their hard work with these poor brand choices?
- Lesson 8: Develop your brand with consumer research.
- Marketers often decide what they think is best, then try to force the consumer to accept those ideas. This "inside out" approach to branding will only succeed by accident. To plan for success, learn what your consumers need and deliver it.
- Lesson 9: Celebrities are usually bad choices for branding.
- In part, they can quickly overshadow the product or company. Despite this, too often the first question from DRTV marketers is "who's going to be the celebrity?" A celebrity might make it easier to start a brand and generate some recognition by association, but at the end of the day a celebrity's desire is to build their own personal brand. To understand how bad this situation can get, consider Salton-Maxim, maker of the George Foreman grill. After several hundred million dollars of media for the George Foreman grill, consumers know it's made by Salton Maxim because Foreman overshadows their name. And while I can't argue with the direct sales power of that show (it's stupendous), Salton's stock price drop from $50 to $1.88 as the shows results dropped off. In other words, they would have been better off to make their company and product more important than George.
- In both the short-run and the long-run, it can be more effective to use unknown actors with great personalities that reflect your brand's promise and make your marketing the most important aspect of the advertising.
Branding is treated with nearly religious reverence in most advertising agencies -- a reverence that too often wastes money on irrelevant advertising.
By contrast, DRTV creates highly-informed consumers through wisely-spent marketing dollars -- a 30-minute show cost-effectively delivers informed consumers that quickly become brand advocates. Now is the time for DRTV practitioners to take advantage of the tremendous power of DRTV advertising.
Claude Hopkins wrote Scientific Advertising in 1924. In his chapter on Naming, he lists 17 successful brands. Eighty years later, eleven remain top consumer brands, including Vaseline and Kodak. Will your DRTV brand be on the list in 2084?