Can branding and direct marketing co-exist? It depends on how religious you (or your corporate style mavens) are about enforcing brand identity in your campaigns.

Good direct marketing can support a brand, but any attempt to consciously promote a brand through direct marketing is typically doomed to failure.

Why? Direct marketing and branding are fundamentally dissimilar. Branding means different things depending who you talk to, but broadly speaking, the objective of most "branding campaigns" would include creating a positive impression of your company and product in the mind of the consumer.

Direct marketing campaigns, in stark contrast, have one goal and one goal only: getting someone to respond. Creating a positive impression of your company can help generate that response, but it's seldom the dominant reason why a prospect or customer would choose to do so.

Moreover, too much emphasis on creating that positive impression can steer your creative away from selling the offer (the raison d'etre of all good direct marketing) and towards copy and design that promote your company or your product. Whilst leaving a prospect with a warm and fuzzy opinion of you and your company may be laudable, if that prospect doesn't respond, you've failed. Period.

Branding and direct marketing most often come into conflict when companies insist on slavish compliance to brand guidelines, be they positioning statements, color palettes, fonts, etc. For example, we've had some clients who require official company fonts for direct mail letters, even when we can demonstrably show that more generic type styles (serif, always) generate measurably higher response.

That's not to say that direct marketing needs to be set apart entirely from the rest of corporate communications. Again, direct marketing can be successful within even the most stringent brand guidelines. However, when those guidelines get in the way of your primary objective: getting the reader to respond, compromise is called for.