Breakthrough
Advertising

Schwartz opens by overturning the romance of the 'creative' ad. Copy, he argues, has no power to create demand. The hopes, fears, and hungers that move people are already there, built up over years by social, economic, and technological forces far larger than any ad budget. The writer's job is humbler and far more lucrative: to channel that existing current onto a single product. He calls the current mass desire, a private want shared by enough people to form a market. Fighting it is fatal. He cites Detroit's failures as proof: Chrysler's squat car offered against the long-low-wide trend, Ford selling safety when buyers wanted horsepower, the doomed Edsel. Even brilliant campaigns die when they run against the tide. Because the desire pre-exists, advertising enjoys an amplification effect: a dollar spent directing demand can return fifty or a hundred in sales, while a dollar spent trying to create demand, which is really education, returns at best a dollar. He sorts the forces that build desire into permanent ones, such as instincts for health, attractiveness, and virility, and forces of change, such as shifting style, mass education, and emerging trends. Each desire has three dimensions to weigh: urgency, staying power, and scope, meaning how many people share it. A product usually touches several desires, but only one can lead, and choosing that dominant desire is the single most important decision the writer makes, since everything rides on it. Finally he separates the physical product, the steel and glass and paper, from the functional product, which is what it actually does for the buyer. People never pay for matter; they pay for performance. Physical facts matter only as proof, to justify price, document quality, and lend believability.

Once you have chosen the desire and the performance that meets it, the headline's only job is not to sell but to stop the reader and pull him into the second sentence, with each sentence buying the next. Where the headline starts depends on the prospect's state of awareness: how close his desire sits to the surface and how much he already knows about your product. Schwartz lays out five stages, easiest to hardest. First, the most aware: he knows the product and wants it, so just name it and a price; this is mechanical work deserving low pay. Second, product-aware: he knows the product but is not yet convinced, and here lives the bulk of advertising, where you name the product and prove its superiority through fresh proof, sharper images, or a new mechanism. Third, solution-aware: he wants the result but does not know your product exists, so you crystallize the still-vague desire in the headline, as 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' does. Fourth, problem-aware: he feels a need but has not connected it to your product, so you name and dramatize the problem, as in 'Corns?'. Fifth, completely unaware: he will not admit the desire, or it cannot be put into words, the hardest case, demanding the most creativity through giving words to a hidden dream, exploiting a hidden fear, or starting from an accepted image. Each stage is separated from the next by a psychological wall, indifference on one side and intense interest on the other. The decisive rule: a headline that triumphs at one stage fails at another, and fails even at its own stage once the market moves on. The deeper the market's ignorance, the more the writer's imagination, not mechanics, creates the value.

The third question to ask of any market is how many competing products have already been there. Schwartz traces five stages of sophistication. In the first, you are first: be plain and direct, stating the claim or the need and nothing more, as in 'Now! Lose Ugly Fat!'. In the second, rivals arrive and the direct claim still works, so you enlarge it, outbidding everyone by promising more pounds lost, more blooms grown, more horsepower added, until the enlargement collapses into disbelief. In the third, the market has heard every extreme and stopped believing, so you must make the old promise fresh through a new mechanism, a different way the result is achieved, as in 'Floats Fat Right Out of Your Body!'. The emphasis shifts from what the product does to how it works; mechanism moves into the headline and the claim into the body. In the fourth, competitors copy and elaborate the mechanism itself, until that too exhausts believability. In the fifth, the market no longer believes anyone and turns away; like the fifth stage of awareness, the answer is to stop pressing promise and mechanism and instead bring the prospect in through identification with himself. Crucially, the desire never dies. It keeps renewing as new buyers enter and old ones grow dissatisfied, so a 'dead' field is really an exhausted set of claims awaiting a new approach. Schwartz walks the cigarette industry through all five stages as his master example, from raw taste appeals to ever more elaborate mechanisms. He closes with a candid note that he reports tactics like overnight claim-copying as observed business realities, not personal endorsements, describing what works in a competitive field rather than recommending it.

Strategy gives you the content of your headline; this chapter is about expression. Schwartz calls it verbalization, increasing a headline's impact through the way it is worded. Having decided what to say, you now decide how. The simplest move is to state the claim baldly, as in 'Lose Weight' or 'Stop Corns', and if you are first in the field, nothing beats it. But where you face competition, or where the idea is too complex to land plainly, you reinforce the claim by binding other images to it through your phrasing. Verbalization serves three ends: it can strengthen a claim by enlarging it, measuring it, or making it vivid; refresh it by twisting it, turning it into a story, or posing it as a challenge; or pull the reader inward by promising information, asking a question, or half-revealing the mechanism. He then offers thirty-eight concrete patterns as thinking prompts rather than formulas. Among them: measure the claim's size or speed, as in '20,000 Filter Traps'; compare it, as in 'Six Times Whiter'; metaphorize it, as in 'Melts Away Ugly Fat'; make it sensory, as in 'The Skin You Love to Touch'; dramatize it, as in 'They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano'; state it as a paradox, as in 'How a Bald-Headed Barber Saved My Hair'; remove its limitations, as in 'Shrinks Hemorrhoids Without Surgery'; tie it to people the prospect admires; pose it as a question; offer how-to information; attach authority; show before-and-after; and stress newness. The point is not to memorize the list but to walk around a single claim and find the angle that gives it the most force. Each device is a doorway, not a mold, and the right shape is dictated by the particular claim, market, and moment.

Closing Part One, Schwartz names three ways writers reach for headlines, worst to best. The shallowest is the word-substitute technique: lifting a proven headline and swapping in your own product name. These echo ads merely remind people of something else and throw away the unique product, market, and timing relationship of the moment; they are what clients write, not copywriters. The second is formulas, memorized rules of expression poured over an idea like lead into a mold. Such rules, like the devices in the previous chapter, help with wording, but the idea itself defies any formula and demands its own shape. The third and only real method is the analytical approach the book teaches, which offers no answers, only questions and guideposts. Its hard truth is that a solution earned over days of effort can be used only once; there are no shortcuts, and the work must be redone for every ad. But the skills compound: probing sharpens, intuition deepens, and sensitivity to the one vital fact grows. The danger is the writer who tires and begins copying others, then copying himself, raiding his own old files; the more successful he is, the stronger that temptation, and the surer it drags him down to mediocrity. Schwartz then situates motivation research. It is a superb source of information about hidden desires and a way to test hunches, but a research finding is never a headline or even a theme, only a direction telling you where not to waste effort and roughly where the answer lies. Turning a fact into an idea, and expressing that idea in its strongest form, still takes all the creative talent any blank page demands. The source of an idea, however profound, is only the beginning.

Opening Part Two, which turns from headlines to body copy, Schwartz maps the three dimensions of the mind the writer must work with. The first is desire: the wants, hungers, and cravings, physical, material, and sensual, that drive a person through life. They already exist and cannot be created or destroyed; they can only be expanded, sharpened, and given a goal. The writer's first task, sometimes his only one, is to make the prospect want, picturing fulfillment so vividly that the prospect nearly lives inside it, then offering the product. The second dimension is identification: the roles a person longs to play and the self-image he wants a purchase to project. These are not physical at all; they double the value of a purchase, so that a woman buying a diet food also builds a youthful, attractive self, and a man buying a car also buys prestige. Every coveted role is one more desire you can harness. The third is belief: the opinions, prejudices, and patterns of reasoning by which a person decides what is true. Advertising is not education and cannot argue beliefs away; like science, it must accept reality as it is and then redirect its energies. Beliefs form a filter that new information must pass or be rejected, and established reasoning creates habit-channels along which conviction must be built. You start from the prospect's beliefs and reason in his logic, not your own. Together, desire, identification, and belief, each part emotion and part thought, are the materials of every ad. The book will study each separately, but in practice they are woven into one fluid path of thought, from a reader's first glance to the final decision.

The first technique of body copy attacks desire directly. Schwartz calls advertising the literature of desire, a twentieth-century wish book that gives form and a goal to wanting. The desires in a prospect's mind are blurred and half-formed, carrying only a fraction of their potential force; the writer's job is to fill them out with concrete images, showing every way they can be fulfilled and multiplying their strength by the number of satisfactions he can suggest. He becomes the script writer for the prospect's dreams, chronicling in minute detail all the tomorrows the product makes possible, so that the sharper and more numerous the pictures, the more the prospect demands the product and the less the price seems to matter. How much space this deserves depends on the medium and on how many fresh angles you can find before repetition breeds boredom. You cannot repeat, Schwartz insists, but you can reinforce: each new setting for the same basic promise strengthens the ones before it. The chapter lists roughly a dozen ways to intensify, including presenting the satisfaction bluntly and in full detail; putting the claims in action so the reader sees himself using the product; bringing the reader directly into the scene; showing him how to test the claims himself; stretching benefits out across time; bringing in an admiring audience; showing experts approving; comparing and contrasting to prove superiority; picturing the dark side of going without; showing how easy the benefit is to get; using metaphor and analogy; summarizing before closing; and putting the guarantee to work. Drawn mostly from mail order, which must complete the sale in a single ad, these devices apply everywhere, usually in more compressed form, all serving one end: to make the prospect realize everything he is getting and everything he would miss.

Alongside the obvious, openly felt desires lies a subtler one, not for satisfaction but for expression. Schwartz calls it the longing for identification, and its rise as a buying motive marks, in his view, the great merchandising revolution of his era. People want to act out roles, to define themselves to the world, to signal the qualities and positions they value. The writer harnesses this in two ways: by turning the product into an instrument for achieving a coveted role, and by turning it into an acknowledgment that the role is already attained. So every product should offer two reasons to buy: the physical satisfaction it delivers, and a way of fulfilling that need which defines the buyer as a particular kind of person. This is the product's non-functional, super-functional value, built in by merchandising rather than engineering. His example: only the poor now buy food for nourishment alone, while the modern shopper selects foods that are modern, slimming, and cosmopolitan because he wants to be up-to-date, youthful, and adventurous. Each such role multiplies the writer's openings, since every new longing for identification is another desire to attach to the product. Roles come in two kinds: character roles, expressed by adjectives like chic, brilliant, or well-read, and achievement roles, signals of success and status. Identification works best when built on roles the prospect already aspires to; Schwartz warns that a suggested identity the market refuses to accept will be rejected outright, sometimes with hostility. The strongest identifications can also spring from the physical product itself. Used well, identification turns a purchase into a statement, letting the buyer say something about himself every time he chooses your brand.

Desire and identification, Schwartz says, are never enough on their own. They must fuse with a third force, belief, to produce the conviction that drives action. Belief is the most complex blend of thought and emotion in the mind: a person's picture of how the world works, but also the security of living somewhere coherent and predictable. Most beliefs are laid down in childhood and form deep channels, so asking someone to overturn one is asking him to become a child again, and he will not. The basic rule is therefore twofold. Violate a prospect's beliefs even slightly and nothing you promise can save the ad. But channel the force of his belief behind a single claim, however small, and that fully-believed claim outsells a hundred half-doubted ones; belief is so powerful it can even carry otherwise absurd claims. For advertising, belief is immutable; you cannot change the prospect's facts, only extend them. Gradualization is the art of doing exactly that: starting from a statement he already accepts and leading him, comfortably and logically, through a succession of more and more remote facts, each one prepared by the one before. Unlike proof or testimonials, which come later, gradualization governs not the content of the ad but its architecture, the sequence in which claims, images, and proofs appear. Every statement has two sources of strength: its own content, and the groundwork laid for it. So you can strengthen any claim either by intensifying it or by repositioning it so the reader is ready to accept it on sight. Effective copy, like effective literature, is built not of words but of reactions, an engineered stream of acceptances flowing toward one goal: the absolute conviction that he must have your product.

Sooner or later you must sell something with built-in handicaps, features that actively repel the buyer. Beyond the basic resistance of parting with money, Schwartz names three categories of drawback: the product that seems too complicated or hard to use, the one whose appeal feels too minor to matter, and the one that simply costs too much. Remarkably, a single mechanism, redefinition, addresses all three. To redefine is to give the product a new definition, to say it is this rather than that, removing a roadblock if possible before the prospect consciously notices it. His classic case is Lifebuoy soap, whose great liability was a harsh medicinal odor that could not be removed without losing its cleaning power. The famous body-odor campaign performed a flip-flop: it focused attention on the buyer's own odor, declared ordinary soap too weak to fight it, and recast Lifebuoy's strong smell as the very proof of odor-destroying strength, turning a liability into the asset, with the smell at the wrapper as instant evidence. This concept-judo is the simplest and often the most effective redefinition, and Schwartz urges using the flip-flop wherever you can. Most cases, though, are subtler and borrow the gradualization devices of the previous chapter to lead the reader, step by step, toward a new picture of the product. He then names three working types: simplification, for the product that sounds too hard, as with the TV-repair book that reframed repairs as easy minor adjustments and never even used the scary word until belief was built; escalation, broadening a too-small appeal into something that matters more; and price reduction, recasting how cost is perceived. In each, the goal is the same: replace a repelling image with an inviting one.

As a prospect reads, Schwartz says, he carries on a silent dialogue, feeding back reactions and demands. These fall into three kinds: tell me more, who says so, and how does it work. Good copy anticipates the exact moment each demand arises and answers it before interest leaks away, which is one of the hardest parts of the craft. This chapter concentrates on the third demand. The prospect likes the promise but must be convinced the product can actually deliver, so you demonstrate it in words, logically, showing exactly how the result is produced. This is the old reason-why copy that Claude Hopkins mastered, present in nearly every great selling ad. The real question is never whether to include a mechanism but how much, and that depends on the prospect's state of awareness. Schwartz lays out three escalating stages. Stage one, name the mechanism: when the prospect already understands and accepts how it works, you simply name the components in bold type and compete on price, as in routine camera or catalog copy, taking advantage of the money rivals spent making that mechanism familiar. Stage two, describe the mechanism: when the prospect does not understand it, or when everyone shares the same mechanism, promise, and price and the market is tiring, you must explain it, with the classic one-two punch of strong promise followed by the reason it can be kept. Stage three, feature the mechanism: when the mechanism itself becomes the point of difference, you build the whole ad around it, especially to convince the reader he is getting a genuine bargain. Throughout, mechanism is not dry explanation but selling copy, proof that makes the prospect want the product more with every line.

No copy really sells a product, Schwartz reminds us; it sells a way of satisfying a desire, and where a desire is commercial, competitors will always crowd in to meet it. He reviews five weapons for beating them. The first four ignore the competition entirely: superiority of product, the ultimate weapon; superiority of promise, which this whole book is a blueprint for; product-role, the identity and prestige your product confers; and response and reaction, the agility to escalate claims, shift mechanisms, and invade new markets. These work best when you dominate a field or your story is so fresh that naming a rival would only lend him prestige. The fifth weapon, the subject here, is direct attack, or concentration. You turn to it when your budget is smaller than the leader's, or when most of your prospects are already his customers and you must crack their loyalty before you can rechannel their desire. But concentration is far more than attack. Schwartz's iron rule: never attack a weakness unless you can supply the solution to it in the same breath. An attack made only for your own gain reads as biased and breeds skepticism and dislike; an attack shown to be for the prospect's good, because your product removes the very weakness, gives him a story he will accept, enough to question even an ingrained loyalty. So concentration is the careful, documented process of pointing out a competitor's weaknesses, dramatizing their disservice to the prospect, and proving your product delivers what he wants without them. It draws on every prior technique: intensification to show the penalty of staying put, gradualization to explain the cause, mechanization to prove the cure, making it a demanding, space-hungry process that combines nearly every tool in the book.

After five ways to build believability from within, Schwartz adds a different approach: borrowing it from the places in society where trust is stockpiled. People do not buy a magazine or turn on a broadcast for its ads; they come to it to understand their world, and they believe what their chosen publication tells them. As long as that faith holds, some of it spills from the editorial pages onto the advertising, since the reader assumes the publication would not carry an untrue ad. This makes the believability of a medium, in Schwartz's view, more important than raw circulation. More subtly, a reader grows used to receiving truth in a particular style and format, until that phraseology itself carries an aura of truth regardless of content, a conditioned believability reflex waiting to be tapped. You tap it by adopting the medium's own voice and look, camouflaging the ad as editorial. The most obvious lever is format: merge your copy into the publication's appearance so the reader shifts gears as little as possible from article to advertisement. His example is a book ad adapted feature by feature for the Wall Street Journal, with the headline set in the Journal's plain upper-and-lowercase type so it does not shout that it is an ad, old-fashioned stacked subheads, decorative bars, left-justified subheads, even an unflattering line drawing instead of a photo because the Journal did not run photos. Each choice an art director would call bad layout made the ad harmonize with its surroundings, roughly doubling readership, pulling power, and staying power, and earning nineteen profitable repeats. It is worth the extra cost, and worth doing for each important medium, because you are tapping an ingrained reflex of trust. Schwartz outlines two further ways to borrow believability beyond format.

The closing chapter reverses the book's method: after dissecting the ad to understand what makes it work, you must tie it together again so it holds attention from beginning to end on all three levels, desire, identification, and believability. Schwartz formalizes the devices that do this. Verification is the obvious believability copy, the statistics, tests, testimonials, authorities, and awards, but its placement matters as much as its content: proof, like a claim, lands hardest exactly where the reader unconsciously demands it and is primed to accept it as necessary and logical. The four processes that determine position, gradualization, redefinition, mechanization, and concentration, each open a spot where proof does double duty. Reinforcement makes two claims do the work of four, letting one statement strengthen another. Interweaving blends emotion, image, and logic into the same sentence rather than walling them into separate sections. Sensitivity is the discipline of giving the reader exactly what he demands at each step, anticipating the questions and shifts of interest that arise as he reads. Momentum draws him deeper and deeper, each paragraph compelling the next so he cannot put the page down. And mood packs the copy with whatever emotion the sale requires, whether drama, excitement, or sincerity, built deliberately by the writer yet felt unconsciously by the reader, working beneath the surface like so much of the ad. Schwartz illustrates with several fully analyzed sample ads, showing how these touches differ in structure across different problems. The lesson of the whole book gathers here: the elements are powerful only when fused into a single, fluid stream of reactions, each carefully prepared, all flowing toward one inevitable conviction.