A mis­take busi­ness­peo­ple often make is when they try to sell their com­pany directly in every com­mu­ni­ca­tion they pro­duce. (I’m refer­ring to the idea that they try to sell their com­pany as being merely open for busi­ness, also called “insti­tu­tional adver­tis­ing,” and not direct mar­ket­ing, which is different.)

Insti­tu­tional adver­tis­ing (or what I call “blind brand­ing”) will draw up imme­di­ate clients. When adver­tis­ing, they spend hoards of cash on repeated, slick and enter­tain­ing ads. When mar­ket­ing to peo­ple for the first time, they blab on until the cows come home. When send­ing out infor­ma­tion, they send beau­ti­fully designed pack­ages that make ship­ping crates look like a joke!

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The com­pe­tent adver­tis­ing man must under­stand psy­chol­ogy. The more he knows about it the bet­ter. He must learn that cer­tain effects lead to cer­tain reac­tions, and use that knowl­edge to increase results and avoid mistakes.

Human nature is per­pet­ual. In most respects it is the same today as in the time of Cae­sar. So the prin­ci­ples of psy­chol­ogy are fixed and endur­ing. You will never need to unlearn what you learn about them.

We learn, for instance, that curios­ity is one of the strongest human incen­tives. We employ it when­ever we can. Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice were made suc­cess­ful largely through curios­ity. “Grains puffed to 8 times the nor­mal size.” “Foods shot from guns.” “125 mil­lion steam explo­sions caused in every ker­nel.” These foods were fail­ures before that fac­tor was discovered.

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The dif­fer­ence between adver­tis­ing and per­sonal sales­man­ship lies largely in per­sonal con­tact. The sales­man is there to demand atten­tion. He can­not be ignored. The adver­tise­ment can be ignored. But the sales­man wastes much of his time on prospects whom he can never hope to inter­est. He can­not pick them out. The adver­tise­ment is read only by inter­ested peo­ple who, by their own voli­tion, study what we have to say.

The pur­pose of a head­line is to pick out peo­ple you can inter­est. You wish to talk to some­one in a crowd. So the first thing you say is, “Hey there, Bill Jones” to get the right per­sons atten­tion. So it is in an adver­tise­ment. What you have will inter­est cer­tain peo­ple only, and for cer­tain rea­sons. You care only for those peo­ple. Then cre­ate a head­line which will hail those peo­ple only.

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Remem­ber the peo­ple you address are self­ish, as we all are. They care noth­ing about your inter­ests or profit. They seek ser­vice for them­selves. Ignor­ing this fact is a com­mon mis­take and a costly mis­take in adver­tis­ing. Ads say in effect, “Buy my brand. Give me the trade you give to oth­ers. Let me have the money.” That is not a pop­u­lar appeal.

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. They site advan­tages to users. Per­haps they offer a sam­ple, or to buy the first pack­age, or to send some­thing on approval, so the cus­tomer may prove the claims with­out any cost or risks.

Some of these ads seem altru­is­tic. But they are based on the knowl­edge of human nature. The writ­ers know how peo­ple are led to buy. Here again is sales­man­ship. The good sales­man does not merely cry a name. He doesn’t say, “Buy my arti­cle.” He pic­tures the cus­tomers side of his ser­vice until the nat­ural result is to buy.

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Have you ever picked up a book off the shelf at a local book­store, read the front and back cov­ers, opened it up and, after read­ing a few pages, just couldn’t put it down?

Do you remem­ber, after buy­ing the book, how you flipped each page with an almost excru­ci­at­ing curios­ity because the story was so tan­ta­liz­ing, you became increas­ingly riv­eted to the book with each sub­se­quent chapter?

Copy is, or should be, the same.

Look at it this way: good copy makes a good case. But great copy tells a good story. They say that a great copy­writer is also a great sales­per­son. But all great copy­writ­ers and all great sales­peo­ple also have one thing in common…

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