FAQ: What Is The Difference Between Image Marketing and Direct Response Marketing?

In the movie Fistful of Dollars, Ramon Rojo tells the Man With No Name (Clint Eastwood)...

"When a man with .45 (Man With No Name) meets a man with a rifle (Ramon), the man with a pistol's a dead man."

Similarly, large advertising and branding agencies are trumpeting...

"When the prestigious advertising agency meets the lonely direct response marketer, the direct response marketer and his client are dead meat but they're just too stupid to realise it."

While in the world of marketing there is not much gun fighting, there are some other considerations to make as to what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. Do you want to impress people and create an image or do you want to sell your stuff? Image marketing is great for the former. Direct response marketing is great for the latter. You have to make a choice here.

Image marketing is great if you don't really care about making a return on your marketing investment. The direct response approach is for companies that want to wisely invest their money and expect hefty returns on their investments.

But let's see the differences between the two...

Image Marketing	Direct Response Marketing
Objective: Generating image, buzz and brand awareness	Objective: Generating opportunities for creating revenue. Brand awareness comes along as a side effect
Getting you random forms of responses from a random selection of people	Getting you pre-specified forms of responses from a tightly specified selection of people
More artistic than scientific	More scientific than artistic
Seller-centred	Buyer-centred
Winning awards and accolades for the advertising agency	Winning sales for the client
Creating image	Creating clients
Stoking the advertiser company and the advertising agency's ego	Stoking the marketplace's ego and encourage response
It's adorable	It's bankable
End result: Achieving momentary liking. Having people admire the ad or website and sigh: "Wow!"	End result: Achieving lasting results. Having people take instant action upon reading the ad or visiting the website

In a recent blog entry, Who Needs Enron? Microsoft Just Got Talked Into Doing A Great Sally Fields Impersonation At The Oscars For A Mere $1.7 Million Per 30 SECONDS... And It's All Perfectly Legal, one of my copywriting mentors, David Garfinkel, nicely outlines the general problem with most agencies.

Direct response marketing is a marketing discipline that involves the planned recording, analysis and tracking of individual buyers' responses and transactions for the purpose of developing and prolonging mutually profitable relationships. In direct response marketing messages are directly sent to buyers. Also, direct response marketing requires an instant response. Well, in a way, no response is a response too.

In contrast, image marketing is really a sort of marketing masturbation. It pleases immensely those who are doing it, but has no effect on those to whom it's done. That is, the creative people and top executives may groan with pleasure creating something cool, but the targeted prospects just roll their eyes and have no idea what's going on. And in the anticipation of creating more "cool" stuff, these companies keep wasting talent, energy and mountains of money. Yes, this approach may work for selling low-priced commodities but not for selling 5, 6 or even 7-figure technical solutions.

Here is a good description of image marketing...

Fred is looking for a wife. So flies to the city where exceptionally beautiful women live. He turns up in front of the local hairdresser shop, shuts his eyes, drops his trousers, flashes his naughty bits, pulls up his trousers, goes away and flies back home. And he keeps repeating this "flashing act" as often as he can afford it, hoping that one day someone runs out of the hairdresser shop and throws herself to his feet. However, no luck so far.

The business equivalent of this is as follows...

There is no action. There is no intention to invoke action. People may admire it, but don't act. It's also far too general.

And here is the direct response version...

Here you solve a specific problem for a very specific target market. And rest assured, the right people will act instantly, and many of the will read your white paper. Run this ad in your local paper's "Classified" section every week, and you'll never run out of clients. It's not instant, but when the momentum hits, it's permanent.

If you want your marketing to work, then you must change your approach and start using direct response marketing!

Here is why...

Unlike image marketing, direct response marketing requires a response from the market. There is a specific pre-defined action to be taken. It tells readers to take a specific action in order to obtain valuable information that can instantly improve the reader's situation.

Here is a typical direct response advertisement: See how the AIDA structure plays out in the ad...

1. Headline that draws the reader's Attention


2. Body copy that raises the reader's Interest


3. Specific benefits that intensify the reader's Desire


4. Clear instruction to take specific and instant Action

Unlike image marketing, direct response marketing is accountable because it's results are trackable. You can track how much you spent on the marketing campaign and how much you earned on it. You have very clear ROI.

Unlike image marketing, which is most often self-serving pontification, direct response marketing is 100% client focused. It emphasises how readers can avoid dangers, capture opportunities and reinforce their strengths.

Now you may say that image is important. Well, maybe. From the practical standpoint, I say sales are more important. And you can't increase your sales by running a TV ad that says every hour that "We're the best and cheapest!", as so many companies do and waste their money on.

Now here two facts to consider...

"I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." ~ Department store magnate John Wanamaker in the 1920s

"More money is wasted in marketing than in any other human activity." ~ Ries & Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing in 2000

In the 21st century you'd better etch this message into your brain...

"Every one of our marketing dollars must come back to us in nice multiples, and we must be able to prove it."

Cost Of Direct Response Marketing

Direct response marketing rates are lower. People know that image advertising is very expensive and a Russian roulette type gamble, so they crank up the prices for image advertising.

Agency or No Agency

I suggest that you stay clear of advertising agencies. Why? Because most of them do useless image marketing. Also, see the career sections of agencies' websites. Most of them are constantly hiring salespeople to cold call and pound pavements in search of the next victims. Their own marketing is not even good enough to get clients for themselves. They rely an army of peddlers and hucksters. If you need to hire hucksters anyway, as most agencies do, why would you pay for such a useless service?

It's like a chain-smoking, burger-munching doctor's telling you that you have to change your lifestyle for something healthier. Why would you go to that doctor in search of health?

Agencies work towards recognition, awards and great trophies in their portfolios. You can read more about this here. For me the only award is to help clients to get and keep more clients. The rest is academic window-dressing.

Agencies design fancy ads that plays to the ego of the advertiser. They create stuff that pleases the advertiser, not the target market. And since they say, advertising is not measurable in any way, you just keep throwing more good money into bad initiatives.

I can even suggest you that you replace all your "professional", glossy, four-colour, catchy, witty brochures with well written direct response pieces. Your printing costs drastically come down and your response rate goes up. Can you handle that?

You have to overcome your own ego need of liking your ads. Your target market must like it. Your feelings about your ads are irrelevant. What counts is the feelings of the prospective client you address.

So, instead of an agency, just hire someone with good direct response marketing knowledge. Together you can develop various marketing pieces, and build a marketing system. Then you can hire a practicum student or a new graduate who can consistently implement your marketing system.

And now back to the movie Fistful of Dollars. At the end of the film, The Man With No Name repeats Ramon's mantra back to Ramon...

"When a man with .45 meets a man with a rifle, you said, the man with a pistol's a dead man. Let's see if that's true. Go ahead, load up and shoot."

In less than a minute later Ramon and his highly esteemed rifle were lying in the dust... dead... very very dead.

So, what the sausage is the point here? Well, similarly to the pontificating Ramon and his ill-fated rifle, advertising agencies' image marketing and "brand awareness" efforts stand no chance against the lonely direct response marketer's pen (well, keyboard) power. Advertising agencies can make people gasp with admiration, "Gaaaawd, this is bloody amazing!" Lonely direct response marketers can make readers take a very specific action.

One of my marketing mentors, the direct response legend, Dan Kennedy sums it up this way...

"Any media sales person, any ad agency person, any consultant, anyone in your own firm who is anti-direct response does not have your best interest at heart. The person who opposes having the results measured accurately already knows that the results are inadequate."

So, you decide what you prefer. Do you want to invoke nice comments or do you want to invoke action. Remember, in ancient Rome, when Cicero spoke, people marvelled. But when Caesar spoke, people marched. You have your crowd. Do you want them to marvel at you, which is good for your ego, or march with you, which is good for your purse? What do you think?

I could even say...

"In the land of marketing the direct response marketing rules."

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