Quotes About Marketing

It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.

Most good copywriters', says William Maynard of the Bates agency, 'fall into two categories. Poets. And killers.

Aldous Huxley, who was once a copywriter, said, 'It is easier to write ten passably effective sonnets than one effective advertisement.' You cannot bore people into buying your product. You can only interest them in buying it.

First, study the product you are going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it.

If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.

When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client. One human being to another, second person singular.

advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not.

One day a man walked into a London agency and asked to see the boss. He had bought a country house and was about to open it as a hotel. Could the agency help him to get customers? He had $500 to spend. Not surprisingly, the head of the agency turned him over to the office boy, who happened to be the author of this book. I invested his money in penny postcards and mailed them to well-heeled people living in the neighborhood. Six weeks later the hotel opened to a full house. I had tasted blood.

The easiest way to get new clients is to do good advertising. During one period of seven years, we never failed to win an account for which we competed, and all I did was to show the campaigns we had created.

Long copy sells more than short copy, particularly when you are asking the reader to spend a lot of money.

Sales are a function of product-value and advertising. Promotions cannot produce more than a temporary kink in the sales curve.

It is usually assumed that marketers use scientific methods to determine the price of their products. Nothing could be further from the truth. In almost every case, the process of decision is one of guesswork.

Whatever you do, for goodness sake, don't change the name of your corporation to initials.

Tell your prospective client what your weak points are, before he notices them. This will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points. Don

All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short.

In my Confessions, I told how I started by making a list of the clients I most wanted – General Foods, Lever Brothers, Bristol Myers, Campbell Soup Company and Shell. It took time, but in due course I got them all, plus American Express, Sears Roebuck, IBM, Morgan Guaranty, Merrill Lynch and a few others, including

Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that's the way to answer them – not by arguments around the table.

Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement,' said Samuel Johnson.

Rosser Reeves: 'Do you want fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve start moving up?

Most campaigns are too complicated. They reflect a long list of objectives, and try to reconcile the divergent views of too many executives.

Take whiskey. Why do some people chose Jack Daniel's, while others choose Grand Dad or Taylor? Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don't make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn't the whiskey they choose, it's the image. The brand image is 90 per cent of what the distiller has to sell.

I could have positioned Dove as a detergent bar for men with dirty hands, but chose instead to position it as a toilet bar for women with dry skin. This is still working 25 years later.

When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.

My brother Francis wrote a letter in Greek to the headmasters of private schools, selling cooking stoves. When some wrote back that they could not read Greek, he sent them another letter – in Latin. This produced orders.