Goodwill, Direct Response, and Social Media
Carnaval just ended this week in Brazil (yes, that is how it’s spelled). For non-Brazilian readers, that equates to my brain no work good, but I made a promise, and the Fresh Picks must flow.
One thing that always strikes me, not only during Carnaval here, but also at shopping malls or even while walking through downtown São Paulo, is how much more common marketing “gimmicks” are. By “gimmick,” I mean blatant sponsored events, pop-ups, or free goodies that don’t seem to directly benefit the sponsor in any way.
Swag giveaways, sponsored pop-ups, and the reciprocity engine
During Carnaval, one notices that the meager shade one encounters is often provided by one of the thousand umbrellas sporting a particular beer company’s logo. Only days ago, I was handed a draft-poured beer by a real estate agent standing outside the site of a forthcoming apartment building, with no requirement to even listen to their pitch. In years past, I’ve been given a hat and free deodorant while stepping off the subway on my way to a “bloco.” I still wear that hat from time to time, and when I see that company’s logo at the pharmacy, I think fondly of that hat.
I’ve seen 15-foot-tall chairs on city corners for furniture companies, I’ve been handed more free experimental soda flavors than I can count, received more free clothing than I have space in my closet for, and every piece of swag only makes me more curious.
Marketing “gimmicks” like swag giveaways and pop-ups raise “goodwill” by tapping into the hardwired human psychological behavior of reciprocity. When you do something for someone or give them a gift, they naturally want to find a way to pay you back. Offering “ungated” value, meaning free items or information with no risk or purchase required on the part of the consumer, is one of the most powerful ways to cultivate a strong relationship.
I was not only astounded by the prevalence of marketing gimmicks in Brazil, but more so, I was captivated by the acceptance, if not expectation, of marketing gimmicks by the Brazilian people. They not only like them, but they also seem to want more advertising in public spaces.
That is, I was astounded until I made the connection to goodwill.
Big Brother Brazil and the (almost unbelievable) comfort with sponsorship
One need only watch the latest season of Big Brother Brazil (a cultural phenomenon I don’t have enough time or pixels to adequately convey the weight of ) to see the level of marketing Brazilians will gladly accept.
Imagine if every challenge on the show Survivor were sponsored by Amazon or Chase. I don’t mean a bug in the corner of the screen, I mean every single piece of wood wrapped in branded colors and logos. If contestants needed to carry a heavy crate, it would be an Amazon package. Imagine if, instead of receiving food and luxuries by winning said challenges, contestants won the opportunity to order their food exclusively from Grubhub, complete with shots of them scrolling through the app and adding things to their cart, to be picked up from a Grubhub-branded boat; yelling “Thank you, Grubhub!” to the sky upon delivery. If every puzzle game were a simple turn-based memorization challenge where contestants took turns trying to remember slogans and factoids for Peter Thiel’s latest private college scheme.
Year after year here, I become more obsessed with the mystery behind Brazilian marketing acceptance. They don’t just like it, they expect it. Brand sponsorship doesn’t elicit sighs and groans as it does in the US; it makes people excited.
Is this phenomenon cultural? Due to a lack of satiation? Or is it something more economical?
In the style of every New York Times bestseller, rather than answer these questions just yet, let me tell you an anecdote first.
A Christmas town square and the strange power of unbranded goodwill
The idea for this article began swirling around in my head on a recent trip to a cousin’s graduation. We were visiting a small Brazilian town around Christmas, and on a walk to the town square, we saw a sign advertising “Kids Meet Santa!” outside a small room in what appeared to be a historic building.
We walked inside and, after immediately being handed free cookies, saw an extremely detailed recreation of Santa’s home in the North Pole, complete with furnishings, lights, music, and a fleet of elves walking around keeping everything tidy. At one point, a small child pulled a light bulb out of a display, and within seconds, an attending elf was on the scene to repair it.
On the other side of the room, an elderly couple sat in large chairs, no doubt the real Clauses, because if they were actors, they were straight out of central casting. They were in full and elaborate costume despite the South American Christmas-time heat.
What really struck me about this scene, though, was the lack of branding. There were scarcely any logos to be seen except for those on the cookie package.
After some searching, I found a small table with pamphlets, and on the pamphlets was the name of a local business (truthfully, I’ve forgotten which specific one) and, in much larger text, the imperative to have a merry Christmas.
Now, despite the fact that labor costs tend to be lower in South American countries for imperial reasons not germane to this article, I recognize the significant cost this little display represents. This is the kind of advertising I, as a US-born 31-year-old, have really only experienced through 50-year-old movies. A bygone variety of advertising that gives, principally, a free and enjoyable experience to the passerby. One not easily tracked for ROI.
There’s a kind of faith in this kind of marketing. Almost a kind of magical gist (a German word I use purposefully here), as the small business embodies and promotes the spirit of communal unity through gift giving.
Enough preamble: goodwill, political economy, and why “gimmicks” exist
I think it's obvious to most that cultural ideology shapes what kinds of persuasion feel “normal.” But the deeper driver of this feeling of “normalcy” is really political economy, and the way the business environment disciplines marketers. In a more financialized, friction-heavy environment, advertising shifts from “creative informing” toward “behavioral science” and “conversion engineering,” and the roadside pop-up that gives you T-shirts is replaced by the internet pop-up that wastes your time.
Less abstractly, when everything is governed by attribution, short budget cycles, and the quiet threat of “prove it or lose it,” marketing starts behaving like a lab, not a public square.
The question stops being “what did this do to the audience’s story about us?” and becomes “what did this do to the ROAS?” When that is the game, you get less faith-based spectacle and more funnel optimization.
Fewer steps mean more conversions, but it also means less of you in the customer journey. That’s a worthwhile tradeoff for a small business with little household brand awareness, but what is usually absent from marketing textbooks is a following section on why large businesses still do brand marketing.
Direct-response marketing began with mailing coupons and surveys in the mail. It had its boom with the rise of the internet. The trackable nature of direct-response has made it so successful that its name is barely recognized anymore; it is now the definition people mean when they use the term “marketing.”
It’s still the best option for small businesses on paper because the data it provides allows for unmatched optimization, which matters when your ad budget contains zero commas rather than one or two. Everything from billboards and TV commercials, to pop-up awnings handing out free t-shirts and Christmas saints giving out free cookies can only estimate their reach and ROI.
Internet-based direct response marketing can tell you far more precisely how many people received your ad, how many times, clicked, where they clicked, whether or not they bought, what they bought, and for how much. It can come at an unforeseen cost (which I will explain), but it is very tantalizing.
Which just makes me all the more dumbstruck by how Brazilian society has seemingly managed to largely resist the siren song of direct-response marketing. Sure, YouTube and Meta ads exist here, but my family and I find ourselves laughing and enjoying the commercials more than we find ourselves cursing them.
Small diversion into marketing theory here.
Every book on lean marketing typically begins with a diatribe against “brand marketing.” If you cannot track an ad (or a gimmick), then it is effectively useless according to the masters of the craft.
There is a lot of truth in this. Money is finite, and measurement is how you defend a budget. But the thought I can’t get out of my head is this: could the optimization of direct response be inadvertently strangling what little art, creativity, and – dare I say – humanity still exists within the field of marketing?
If we confuse accountability with a narrow kind of tracking, then the answer is unambiguously, yes. Accountability doesn’t have to be a single metric; it can mean “we can explain why this should work, we can see leading indicators that it is working, and this gives us options we can test next.” That is different from treating ROI as synonymous with one neat, capturable conversion path, and then declaring everything you can’t measure useless.
What does Dan Kennedy say about social media content marketing?
I find myself wondering how the notorious direct-response acolytes like Dan Kennedy wrap their heads around social media content marketing. Dan Kennedy is fiercely and famously opposed to spending money on marketing that cannot be tracked, refusing to pay for “the new and mystical metrics” of likes, friends, and page views.
However, Kennedy would absolutely not tell you to skip content marketing.
Instead, Kennedy considers himself a “Brand Atheist” who is simultaneously a “Brand Believer.” The solution to this paradox is to understand that brand identity, goodwill, and customer loyalty should be acquired as a free byproduct of direct-response marketing, not purchased outright.
In practice, that means engineering content so it can behave like direct response when it needs to, but also seeing content more as a lead magnet. That is to say: a truly high-value, small-scale version of your main offer that you give away for free. It must solve a small problem for your customers so they’re more likely to purchase your main offer for their big problems.
The cool thing about perceiving social media content as a lead magnet is its narrative ability to make cold leads problem and solution-aware at the same time. Typically, social media ads are meant to make people problem-aware, whereas lead magnets mostly make people solution-aware. Social media content as a lead magnet can do both.
Social media content marketing can largely be categorized as this kind of non-directly-trackable marketing spend, the benefits of which should be measured secondarily by follower counts and likes, and principally by customer and follower “goodwill” as measured by macro-metric trends and the unexpected opportunities that arise from telling your story skillfully and valuably on social media.
What is ‘goodwill’, and if it isn’t directly trackable, what is its purpose?
High-quality social media posts give followers (warm leads) value at the cost of only their time. That stock of free value given is the “goodwill” a follower has towards your brand.
The higher their goodwill towards your brand, the more likely a follower is to see your existing prices as a better deal because they’ve already received substantial value from you. If you give them constant value through your posts, your followers are more likely to buy your product, buy more often, and buy your more expensive offers because you’ve already given them something for “nothing.” That is why I say goodwill does show up in the metrics, but not in one alone; it shows up in macro-metric trends.
The value you give on social media doesn’t have to be coupons. It can be information like tips or advice, it can be customer reviews or unusual product use cases, but it can also be pure entertainment like jokes, skits, and memes. What is “valuable” to your followers will depend largely on their unique personalities and what social values your brand attracts in its customers.
As I’ve said, goodwill can be notoriously hard to track precisely outside of rigorous table joins of content data with accounting data, but there are more obvious signals that can indicate one’s stochastic brand and content marketing is having a positive effect.
Hooray! Another anecdote!
When we began working with one of our first clients here in Brazil, in the early testing phase, we still hadn’t found what exact content strategy really resonated with her audience yet. This isn’t an uncommon problem. The early testing phases for a small business are often the hardest strategically because of the small amount of available data. Followers come and go, like-counts fluctuate, and few initial conversions mean slower ad optimization insights.
That said, we know our process works because we’ve seen it work so many times. So we pushed on.
We stuck to our best production practices and applied our improvement framework to the content, changing our strategy when the data indicated statistically significant improvements.
Despite the sparse initial indicators, the symptoms of increased goodwill became more and more obvious over time.
As the quality of our client’s social media content improved, so did the number of people coming up and talking with her at her pop-ups in real life, usually ordering something before they left. She received not one, but two offers to have her product featured in Brazilian TV shows, as well as a local radio appearance. She came to be seen as the central node of her artistic community, and people continue to seek her out for advice.
The common factor in all of that stochastic success was that people would mention her social media as the way they discovered her brand and decided to reach out.
“Gimmicks” can be tracked if you stop demanding perfect attribution
Traditional guerrilla marketing tactics, similar to goodwill and content marketing, absolutely can and should be tracked wherever applicable. Direct response principles dictate that every marketing dollar must be accountable. The best way to track giveaways is by tying them to a specific, measurable action like coupon codes, hashtags, or QR codes to unique landing pages.
If you offer a free gift in exchange for booking a sales appointment, you can precisely track how many gifts were distributed against how many appointments were held and how many closed into actual sales. For larger physical pop-ups or massive street giveaways, the resulting digital footprint can be a data source, such as the volume of social media buzz and digital engagement sparked by the physical event.
The metrics are out there; you just have to think outside of the analytical box from an attribution standpoint.
This is the same tactic you need for social media content marketing. Ultimately, the goal of content marketing is “goodwill,” all else is an – albeit important – second-order effect.
Yes, one does content marketing primarily to capture leads, increase sales conversion rates, retain customers, and drive down advertising costs. All of which are highly trackable metrics, but “goodwill” captures these metrics in the holistic aggregate, and its main driver is free qualitative value giveaways, not any singular quantitative metric that can be tallied in a report.
Digital ads are highly trackable. So let them be trackable! You can have multiple tactics at one time. Traditional “gimmicks” along with content marketing are a beast of a different sort with different payoffs and different, more ethereal KPIs.
Why guerrilla marketing tactics feel alive outside the US, and like they’re dying inside it
Regarding why these experiential “gimmicks” remain popular globally but face challenges in the US, cultural purchasing behaviors play a massive role, but I think history is a better indicator. Some cultures demand highly personalized, face-to-face interactions. In Chinese superstores, major brands employ armies of uniformed in-store promoters to dispense samples and pitch products person-to-person. In these cultures, consumers want to physically feel the product and receive a detailed, in-person understanding before making a purchase.
A casual reading of Chinese history eliminates any mystery as to why the average Chinese person might be skeptical of claims made by private enterprise, especially from international brands. Modern Chinese governance puts an extreme emphasis on business honesty and productive capacity over inflationary financialization tactics.
But I digress. I bring this up to say that truly understanding a culture means truly understanding the economic history that gave rise to that culture.
I’ve often speculated that Brazil’s non-violent national separation from its European motherland created a more hospitable environment for the aristocracy inside the burgeoning country than perhaps the US had initially. These aristocratic affinities, in contrast to the newborn US’s more bourgeois affinities, appear to me to have manifested, centuries later, in a Brazilian middle class that has sky-high expectations for its retail and food service workers.
Appearance can matter more than a business's product itself here.
A restaurant that desires a good reputation in Brazil is expected to have several uniformed waiters waiting in the wings, standing at attention, hands behind their backs, even if the dining hall is completely empty.
A small fault in one’s advertised product or service is grounds for a complete refund, and such a refund is usually given immediately without question.
Package delivery drivers will ignore doorbells and stand in front of one’s home, yelling the name of the recipient, and the recipients happily come running.
Even more interesting is that this expectation of conspicuous brand positioning extends to individual entrepreneurs, not just established businesses. Though there is a noticeable difference in goodwill.
It is not uncommon for salesmen to enter restaurants and solicit every patron in the building for a donation in exchange for beads or candy without so much as a glance from the waitstaff; each patron patiently listening to the salesman’s entire pitch before considering their offer.
At traffic lights, candy ropes or small handkerchiefs will be draped over the side mirror of every single idling car, sometimes as jugglers or acrobats dance in the crosswalk. If one takes the item from their mirror, they are expected to pay the seller, no matter if it holds up traffic. São Paulo drivers, for as hyper-aggressive as they are, never seem to mind waiting for these transactions to be completed or for the purveyors to make their way back through the line of cars, collecting the unwanted items.
I’d wager that the average São Paulo driver is more likely to blow through a red light than so much as honk at a man selling candy in the street, even if that transaction makes them have to wait at the same light again.
Though there is no tipping culture in Brazil, every year at Christmas, the men who run behind the garbage trucks collecting the city’s bagged refuse, plead (read: yell) their case to people inside their houses. And every year, the people heed the call, coming to the streets, money in hand, to give their thanks. Brazilian sanitary workers have better marketing than US sanitary workers, it would seem.
In contrast, US consumers have been heavily saturated by advertising for more than a century, making them highly resistant to intrusive marketing. At one time, this forced a shift toward “permission marketing” rather than interruptions, but I see signs that this trend is beginning to reverse itself. Modern US ad creative takes one of three paths: the aggressive non sequitur meant to force itself into your memory without regard to brand goodwill, the sad and straightforward “We will sell you this product for this amount of money” ad, and the rare, deeply thought-out and largely ignored ad. They all stem from the same miscalculation of placing quantitative metric optimization above qualitative value expenditure.
Walk through any mall today in the US. One is overcome with a weird feeling of dread. Like walking through the ruins of a bygone and ancient civilization, refurbished by the present citizens. Many will say that online marketing killed the American mall, but I counter this with both the thriving Brazilian online delivery and shopping mall cultures.
No, I think the murderer was Gordon Gekko in the boardroom with the poisoned chalice. Obsessions with optimizing singular metrics that ignored the downstream effects of widespread investment in goodwill-building tactics slowly starved and killed the American third-space.
Not to belabor the point too much, but though I don’t believe corporations are people, they are made up of people, each with their own goals and desires, trying to make their way. The heartlessness of marketing comes from those people forgetting they’re members of the communities they’re advertising to.
When a YouTube ad interrupts your free time, it buys the viewer’s attention directly from their stock of goodwill. The Brazilian patron in the restaurant or driver waiting at the streetlight has a respect for the solicitor built on the goodwill that comes from the community. “This is a person trying their best to make a living, and they’re trying to give me something in exchange at the same time.” Brazilian businesses make a point of giving free value, loudly and often, to their communities for a similar reason: They want to show people that they believe business is not supposed to be about a bottom line, but rather about filling needs within communities. The gimmicks do not interrupt the main event; they enable it and enhance it.
If the market begins to ignore you and your advertisements, your only options are to become more invasive or become more human.
The sad part is that the tools of modern direct response make the invasive option look easier to justify on a dashboard.
Direct response does not remove humanity, but bad incentives can
I want to be clear here.
This is not a tirade against direct marketing approaches. CaJu Creative lives or dies by direct response marketing. My title on LinkedIn begins with “Direct Response Diagnostician” for a reason.
The optimization of direct response doesn’t have to strangle the “humanity” in marketing; it can demand it. People buy based on emotion and justify it retroactively with logic. Data can empower human connection. Automation can free up humanity. Marketing can be a human(e) act.
As I’ve said in a previous article, even a far-future, “Star Trek-esque,” utopian society without the need for mass commodity production or wages would still have a need to disseminate ideas among its people effectively and efficiently. The respect with which it would do so is my exact consideration here.
At its core, effective marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem.
Even if it’s rarely seen or performed as such.
Strict accountability to the numbers can mutate into something deadly, an obsession with only what is immediately attributable. That is when marketing becomes cold, clinical, and purely transactional.
Everybody wants community development, but nobody wants to develop a community.
I still find myself explaining the unforeseen benefits that can arise from good old-fashioned brand marketing gimmicks to my US clients far more than my Brazilian clients.
A thought just occurred to me, maybe CaJu should start giving away hats?
Until next time, stay fresh.
- Casey