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Preemptive Advertising Strikes
One of the most famous ad men from the 1920%u2019s was Claude Hopkins, perhaps you've heard of him. Hopkins is really the Father of modern advertising. He invented
test marketing, coupon sampling and copy research. Many of the companies he helped start are still going strong, like, Palmolive, Pepsodent, Quaker Oats, etc. He wrote two excellent books called "Scientific Advertising" and "My Life in Advertising". You can get these published together at www.amazon.com. It's well worth your reading. In fact, the late advertising great David Ogilvy says "Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read Scientific Advertising seven times." Pretty powerful statement and I agree. Anyway, let me share with you one of Hopkins greatest secrets for attracting more business. It's called the strategy of performing preemptive strikes. That means telling a story and educating the prospect about how things are done in your industry. Usually it's the same thing any one of your competitors could tell. But by telling it first you gain a tremendous advantage. Hopkins rightly states in his book that a majority of advertising done in his times (and I'd have to say today as well) is based on the plea "Buy my brand", "Come to my store", "Give me the money which you give to others". Usually this falls in the category of boasting and bragging advertising. Consumers don't care one lick about you, they care about the benefits they'll get from dealing with you. So here's how Hopkins used this psychology to grow Van Camp's pork and bean business. After doing some research Hopkins found that 94% of housewives were baking their own beans at home and only 6% were buying canned beans. But everybody advertising canned baked beans was shouting "Buy my brand". There was no benefit. That's why Hopkins would run advertising explaining how it took 16 hours to bake beans at home and you could never make home baked beans digestible. He went on to talk about the crispy beans on top and the mushy beans on the bottom. Then he explained the process Van Camp's used to select their beans, of the soft water they used, how they made the skins less tough by removing the lime. And of the steam ovens where the beans were baked at 245 degrees in sealed containers so no flavor was lost. Then finally he offered a free sample for comparison. This campaign was an enormous success, yet every other canned bean manufacturer could tell the exact same story. However, if they tried people would have
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