This Is Marketing by Seth Godin

Brand marketing makes magic; direct marketing makes the phone ring
Lester Wunderman was the father of direct marketing. He named it and used it to build
American Express, the Columbia Record Club, and a hundred other projects.
In 1995, I asked Lester to be on the board of Yoyodyne, the online direct marketing
company I founded before the worldwide web was a thing.
Lester was first in describing the differences between brand and direct marketing, but
his ideas have never been more relevant. Thanks to the rise of Google and Facebook,
there’s now more direct marketing than ever before in history.
The difference is about what happens after the ad runs:
Direct marketing is action oriented. And it is measured.
Brand marketing is culturally oriented. And it can’t be measured.
If you run an ad on Facebook and count your clicks, and then measure how many of
them convert, you’re doing direct marketing.
If you put a billboard by the side of the highway, hoping that people will remember
your funeral parlor the next time someone dies, you’re doing brand marketing.
It’s entirely possible that your direct marketing will change the culture (that’s a nice
side effect). It may very well be that the ads you run, the catalogs you send out, and the
visits to your site add up to a shift in the story that people tell themselves.
And it’s entirely possible that your brand marketing will lead to some orders (that’s
another nice side effect). It may very well be that your billboard leads to someone getting
off at the next exit and handing you money, or that your sponsorship of a podcast leads to
someone hiring your company.
The danger is in being confused.
The extraordinary growth of Google’s and Facebook’s revenue is due to only one thing:
many of the ads that are run on these services pay for themselves. A hundred dollars’
worth of online advertising generates $125 in profit for the advertiser. And she knows
this, so she buys more. In fact, she keeps buying ads until they stop paying for
themselves.
On the other hand, brand advertising (for products like Ford, Absolut Vodka, and
Palmolive) shaped our culture for generations. But these brands and countless others
can’t possibly build direct marketing campaigns that work. And so the shift to a measured
direct marketing environment online has been stressful and riddled with failure.
The approach here is as simple as it is difficult: If you’re buying direct marketing ads,
measure everything. Compute how much it costs you to earn attention, to get a click, to
turn that attention into an order. Direct marketing is action marketing, and if you’re not
able to measure it, it doesn’t count.
If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure. Engage with the
culture. Focus, by all means, but mostly, be consistent and patient. If you can’t afford to
be consistent and patient, don’t pay for brand marketing ads.
The two paragraphs above ought to have paid for the time and money you’ve spent on
this book. I’m hoping that’s not the only thing that repays your investment, but even the