It is a simple idea, really: orchestrating brand building and direct marketing (DM) into a synergistic harmony. Marketers use brand ads as instruments in the critical role of consumer awareness building. DM identifies prospective consumers and helps the sales team convert them to paying customers. Brand ads create an emotional connection, while DM uses persuasion and incentives to get the prospect to act, ultimately choosing your firm over a competitor. Achieving synchronization between the two is key in creating a seamless buying process for consumers, the kind which leads invariably toward a successful conversion.

An effective brand/response campaign combines branding ads across television, radio, print and online media channels, and joining them with response vehicles such as direct mail and e-mail. A successful marketer ties it all back to a centralized prospect database. The database connects these individual media channels into a closed-loop marketing system, adding power without increasing the media expenditure. It’s like fitting a Harley cruiser with a turbojet engine.

A well-executed brand/response campaign builds awareness, identifies qualified prospects and then leads them along the purchase path with a series of communications designed to educate and inform. Each message includes a purchase incentive and purchase mechanism. Over time, prospects progress from general interest, to desire, to conviction, and finally to buying your product or service. This approach recognizes the disparate levels of interest and purchase conviction among prospective consumers. It treats each one accordingly, without letting qualified prospects fall through the cracks because of some ill-suited, one-size-fits-all approach.

Key in any brand/response strategy is re-purposing (if it’s not already) your brand advertising engine into a dual-purpose prospect generator – a tool for both capturing the attention of interested consumers and facilitating their response with an interactive user experience. It’s a cost effective way of engaging consumers with your brand, gathering their primary data, and preparing for their purchase decision at the same time.

With the undisputed benefits of brand/response integration, why is it that many agencies refuse to bring down the institutional walls between these two marketing elements? Typically, it’s a simple case of organizational complexity – especially for larger agencies – that precludes a consolidation of brand and response. Large firms with hundreds of employees and dozens of clients are normally divided into client-specific teams who, in turn, marshal specific in-house resources, build relationships with outside agencies and utilize customized media mixes to serve their brands.

In other words, these “departmentalized” teams necessarily set themselves apart from each other in order to service the unique needs of clients. They claim their own piece of the consumer landscape, and often close themselves off to that which doesn’t directly impact their specific client(s). Subdivision ensues, and complexity reigns. Each team may have small groups with concentrations in e-mail marketing, or search, or display, or IT. This micro specialization by client and tool tends to close down communication and consumer sharing channels between client teams, and ultimately derail opportunities for mutual success within a firm.

Again, none of this is necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It’s the natural tendency of an agency growing its client base and building a corresponding infrastructure to handle it. The trick is maintaining that original convergence that allowed you to grow in the first place – that ability to seamlessly shift resources and prospect information from one client team to another.

Growing agencies like The Leadstream are able to effectively marry these brand and response solutions, allowing the delivery of high value performance acquisition services – from branding, to response, and finally, purchase – with real cost-savings for our partners. We’re taking steps now to ensure that as revenues grow and demand increases, we’ll maintain the institutional flexibility to serve multiple clients with throughly integrated media channels and teams.

“Stand-alone disciplines don’t work anymore,” says Wunderman chairman/CEO Daniel Morel. “With more fragmentation in the media, all the channels have to be integrated. That’s where you get the biggest bang for your buck.”

We couldn’t agree more.