By com­par­ing and con­trast­ing the “two worlds” of direct mar­ket­ing and brand mar­ket­ing, Andrew Chen dis­cusses why metrics-driven mar­ket­ing shouldn’t usurp that of ‘brand­ing’.

The nature of inter­net mar­ket­ing makes it easy to have a highly account­able, metrics-driven view – but com­pa­nies that are highly met­rics dri­ven eas­ily over­look hard-to-measure issues like brand and user expe­ri­ence. The rea­son is that when all prod­uct decision-making is run through metrics-driven reports, soft things like “Brand” show up as costs, but never as benefits.

This leads to sys­tem­atic ero­sion in many “soft” but impor­tant fac­tors, like cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, brand value, and “love.” And ulti­mately you need all of these things to cre­ate a mas­sive, endur­ing con­sumer brand – it’s not enough to opti­mize funnels.