MCOL Blog

Brand Direct Marketing: Value Driven Action Lifts Topline

Branding and direct response have long been cornerstones of successful marketing campaigns.  On their own, each contributes an important piece of the marketing puzzle. Brand establishes position, generates awareness and builds preference for a company. Direct response is actionable. It gives people a reason to connect with your business and moves them into the sales cycle.

The wall between branding and direct response is coming down. It has to! The pace of marketplace change—technological advances, generational diversity and product commodization—demands an integrated, efficient approach that drives topline results. Effective marketing means opening up a dialogue with consumers and carefully tracking the conversation. Companies large and small are doing it and, they are seeing sales increase and their brand equity enhanced.

Brand direct is a way of combining the emotion evoked from brand advertising with the workhorse tools of direct response. A balanced approach means consistent communications that encourage interaction from prospects and promises a more meaningful customer experience. Here, direct response marketing tactics (data-driven segmentation and in-market learning supported by a strong call-to-action) take advantage of general advertising tactics. Using this model you get marketing for all media that is measurable and tied to specific sales goals—it’s where strategic thinking and persuasive creativity come together.

For brand direct marketing to achieve the best blend of branding and direct response, consider these three guiding principles:

All communications impact brand, so make sure your communications have brand impact. In other words, don’t think of brand or image campaigns as being separate and distinct from direct response. Awareness is only the first step. Every campaign should be designed to build your brand while eliciting a specific response from your target audience. The key is to educate prospective customers while pre-selling your product or service. Then, show them how to navigate the purchasing process to start a long-term relationship with your company.

Customers and prospects are always telling you something about themselves…listen. New tools and technologies are giving marketers access to an unprecedented amount of data about consumers. Turn this data into intelligence that helps you understand how and why your customers buy. Discover who are your biggest promoters…and most pesky detractors. Listening enables you to refine and replicate the purchasing process for prospective customers. By effectively profiling and segmenting your target audience you can deliver the right message at exactly the right time and in the right place.

Be ready for the next big opportunity. Today’s marketing environment is dynamic and fast-paced. It means your business is constantly evolving due to the constant flow of useful information—sales statistics, click streams, response analysis, competitive intelligence and more. You can use this knowledge to maximize your marketing performance, tweak messaging, adjust creative approaches and evaluate new media outlets. This allows for better opportunity analysis, plus newfound agility when it comes to:

•  Achieving product–price–promotion differentiation.
•  Addressing competitors head-on in sales situations.
•  Articulating customer preferences and perceptions.

Smart marketing can no longer depend on traditional silos. Brand direct marketing effectively leverages the value of your brand with proven direct response tactics. It enables a company to call for immediate action, initiate a customer relationship and then maintain an ongoing, one-on-one dialogue creating loyal followers. And, brand direct produces powerful, measurable results. 

Lindsay Resnick, Chief Marketing Officer, Finelight, lresnick@finelight.com

The Underinsured: 45 vs. 17 million
In addition to the uninsured, there is a significant population of underinsured Americans that don’t have adequate coverage to come close to addressing their medical needs. These underinsureds face significant financial burdens and barriers to receiving necessary care, and are a significant problem for health care providers as well.

But a basic problem in examining this population is defining the scope. While identifying the uninsured is pretty straight-forward, "under-insured" is a relative term that can mean different things to different groups of stakeholders. How many underinsured Americans are there? That depends upon how you define underinsured.

If we use a definition advanced by Consumer Reports, the number could be 45.2 million. If we use a definition advanced by AHRQ, the number could be 17.1 million. That’s quite a spread.

Consumer Reports recently released results from a health insurance survey conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center in May 2007, which sampled 2,905 Americans between ages 18 and 64 and among other things tackled the issue of the underinsured.

Consumer Reports defines the underinsured as persons with health plan coverage that have two or more of the following complaints about their health plans: "It does not adequately cover costs of prescription drugs; doctor visits; medical tests; surgery or other medical procedures; catastrophic medical conditions; or the deductible is too high."

Applying this definition to their survey respondents, Consumer Reports estimates 24% of the U.S. adult population under age 65, which based on current U.S. census figures of 188.4 million adults in this age group, works out to an estimated 45.2 million people. Consumer Reports indicated the "median household income of respondents who were "underinsured" was $58,950, well above the U.S. median. Twenty-two percent live in households making more than $100,000."

According to the survey, 43% o of the underinsured reported that they postponed going to the doctor because they couldn't afford it, 28% of the underinsured put off filling prescriptions, 27% said they were still in debt to doctors and hospitals, and 3% of the underinsured said medical bills had forced them to declare bankruptcy. Consumer Reports broke out responses to the following circumstances by "Well Insured" vs. Underinsured categories:

Of course, the Consumer Reports definition is entirely subjective. Researchers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) last year tackled this definition with a more objective measure, and published their findings in JAMA. The AHRQ definition of underinsured?  "insured persons with health care service burdens in excess of 10% of tax-adjusted family income." 

On this basis AHRQ found that in "2003, there were 48.8 million individuals (19.2%) living in families spending more than 10% of family income on health care, an increase of 11.7 million persons since 1996. Of these individuals, about 18.7 million (7.3%) were spending more than 20% of family income. In 2003, individuals with higher-than-average risk of incurring high total burdens included poor and low-income persons and those with nongroup coverage, aged 55 to 64 years, living in a non-metropolitan statistical area, in fair or poor health, having any type of limitation, or having a chronic medical condition. Applying our definition of underinsured to the insured population, an estimated 17.1 million persons younger than 65 years were underinsured in 2003, including 9.3 million persons with private employment-related insurance, 1.3 million persons with private nongroup policies, and 6.6 million persons with public coverage."

Thus the number of underinsured under age 65 Americans might be 45.2 million, according to the Consumer Reports definition, or  17.1 million according to AHRQ. Quite a difference in numbers.