DM-Style Metrics Can Help Your Branding Efforts Measure Up

Previous Page: E-metrics to the rescue

Learn from success

Overall, you want to combine the art of traditional branding and the immediacy of direct marketing to produce measured, tracked, analyzed and tested results. What you're striving for is incremental success that continuously helps feed the marketing cycle for ongoing innovation and improvement.

The shift from traditional advertising or marketing to direct branding will help you confidently point to measurable marketing milestones and outcomes. Whereas branding and the classic direct marketing used to be separate disciplines, the two have discovered that they need to merge. Marketing accountability becomes the norm and is absolutely necessary to compete and survive in this day.

If you consider who is making money deep in the current recession, it's those direct branders who have a hyper-testing approach to marketing: Amazon, Netflix and Capital One, to name a few. Taking the lead from these businesses, brand marketers should be predicting behavior, measuring outcomes and applying knowledge gained, now and for the foreseeable future.

Today, branding and measurement are not mutually exclusive. Great branders understand that they need to add the measurement metric of direct marketing to their work in order to prove ROI. The C-suite expects marketing to show a positive impact to the bottom line, and those marketers that can will not only survive, but thrive.

Grant A. Johnson is the founder of Brookfield, Wisconsin-based Johnson Direct LLC. (grant.johnson@johnsondirect.com)