“When you plan or prepare an advertisement, keep before you a typical buyer. Your subject, your headline has gained his or her attention. Then in everything be guided by what you would do if you met the buyer face-to-face.If you are a normal man and a good salesman you will then do your level best.”
“The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want. But next to that comes lack of true salesmanship.”
“The best ads ask no one to buy. That is useless. Often they do not quote a price. They do not say that dealers handle the product. The ads are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information.”
“The maker of the electric sewing machine motor found advertising difficult. So, on good advice, he ceased soliciting a purchase. He offered to send to any home, through any dealer, a motor for one weeks’ use. With it would come a man to show how to operate it. “Let us help you for a week without cost or obligation,” said the ad. Such an offer was resistless, and about nine in ten of the trials led to sales.”
“A large percentage of people who read an ad and decide to act will forget that decision in five minutes.”
“The appeals we like best will rarely prove best, because we do not know enough people to average up their desires.”
“We learn that cheapness is not a strong appeal. Americans are extravagant. They want bargains but not cheapness. They want to feel that they can afford to eat and have and wear the best. Treat them as if they could not and they resent your attitude.”
“This is very important to consider in written or personal salesmanship. The weight of an argument may often be multiplied by making it specific. Say that a tungsten lamp gives more light than a carbon and you leave some doubt. Say it gives three and one-third times the light and people realize that you have made tests and comparisons.”
“The product itself should be its own best salesman. Not the product alone, but the product plus a mental impression, and atmosphere, which you place around it.”
“Almost any questions can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them— not by arguments around a table.”
“Picture successful men, not failures, when you advertise a business course. Picture what others wish to be, not what they may be now.”
