The most dangerous question in ecommerce is "Should I focus on branding or direct response?" It’s a false dichotomy that has led countless founders astray. The right answer is that branding is your most effective direct response strategy. In today's market, you don’t get to choose one or the other. You build a brand that powers your performance, or you slowly bleed out on rising ad costs until you become irrelevant.
The real problem is that for years, operators got addicted to the short-term, measurable high of channel-specific ROAS. It was clean. It was easy. You put a dollar in, you got three dollars out. But as Alex Hormozi points out on an episode of The Game with Alex Hormozi, this pure-play direct response model is incredibly rare now. The privacy changes with iOS 14 didn't create this problem, but they certainly accelerated its arrival. Attribution became murky, costs skyrocketed, and the old playbook stopped working. The businesses built on a flimsy foundation of transactional, unbranded advertising suddenly found themselves with an unsustainable customer acquisition model.
This is why Andrew from Ecommerce Playbook makes the powerful point that "bad brands are going away." A "bad brand" isn't necessarily one with a bad product. It’s a brand with no story, no point of view, and no relationship with its customers beyond the transaction. It relies entirely on renting eyeballs from platforms like Meta and Google. When the rent goes up, the business model collapses. A good brand, however, creates its own gravity. It earns attention, builds an audience, and establishes trust that makes every direct response ad more effective and more profitable.
Melding Brand and Performance
The consensus view gets this partially right. Nobody serious will tell you to just "do branding" without a clear path to revenue. You have to make sales to survive. But where the consensus goes wrong is in treating brand and performance as two separate budget items or, even worse, as sequential steps where you "earn the right" to do branding after you’ve scaled with direct response. This is a fatal mistake. Your brand is built in every single touchpoint, especially your "performance" ads.
What does this look like tactically? It means your Meta ads shouldn't just show a product with a discount. They should tell a micro-story. They should have a point of view. As Emma Schermer Tamir notes on The Seller's Edge, strong branding helps you stand out in a crowded marketplace, and that starts with your creative. Is your ad communicating why you exist, who you're for, and what you stand for? Or is it just another generic product shot? This is a core part of building a brand that has what the EcomCrew hosts call that "Fortune 500 feel"—a sense of legitimacy and trustworthiness that directly impacts conversion rates.
A brand is a memory in a customer's mind. Every ad, every email, every package is an opportunity to strengthen that memory or fade into the noise. The goal is to give people the words to describe you, a concept Alex Hormozi explains with perfect clarity. When someone says, "Oh, you have to try this, it's the one that does X," the "it's the one that does X" part is the brand you’ve successfully built. That brand recall is what turns a potential customer into an actual one.
Building a Resilient Engine
The most overlooked, second-order effect of this integrated approach is resilience. When your brand is strong, you're not wholly dependent on any single channel. Ezra Firestone talks about this on the DTC Podcast, advocating for proactive SEO and content that builds organic traffic over time. This isn't a "branding" exercise; it’s a direct response channel with a longer feedback loop. You're creating assets that capture intent, build authority, and generate sales for years. This is the essence of long-term brand building.
This approach fundamentally changes how you measure success. Instead of obsessing over daily ROAS on a specific ad set, you start looking at blended metrics like Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER). You get serious about tracking cohort lifetime value (LTV). You understand that some activities, like a brilliant top-of-funnel video or a deep, informative blog post, won’t have a 24-hour payback period, but they are a critical investment in lowering your blended customer acquisition cost over the next six months.
This is the core of Scaling With Brand Identity. It recognizes that the value isn't just in the immediate click, but in building an audience that trusts you, prefers you, and seeks you out directly. That’s a moat no competitor can cross and no algorithm change can take away.
Your First 90 Days
If I were taking over a brand tomorrow that had been stuck in the direct response trap, here’s what I’d do.
First 30 Days: I would conduct a full audit of every creative asset and customer touchpoint. From the ad creative to the abandoned cart emails to the packaging, I’d ask: "Does this feel like it came from a brand with a purpose, or is it generic and transactional?" I would immediately start injecting brand storytelling into every single "direct response" ad. No more feature lists without benefits. No more product shots without context. We would define our story and tell it consistently.
Next 30 Days: I would launch one initiative purely designed to build brand equity, with its primary KPI being engagement and reach, not immediate sales. This could be a powerful piece of content, a strategic collaboration, or a community event. Following Ezra Firestone’s advice, this would be about building an asset that pays dividends down the line. This is a crucial step in moving from a renting-eyeballs model to an owning-an-audience model.
Final 30 Days: I would reshape the marketing dashboard. We would move from channel-specific ROAS as the North Star to a more holistic view centered on blended CAC, LTV by cohort, and the growth of our direct and organic traffic. This isn't about abandoning measurement; it’s about measuring what actually matters for sustainable growth. This is how you escape the Branding Vs. Direct Response trap and start building a business with real longevity.