Breakthrough advertising
Breakthrough advertising
Breakthrough Advertising
Eugene M Schwartz
1966
Breakthrough Advertising is one of the books that every successful copywriter insists that you read. Focusing on direct response in particular, it gives tons of practical techniques to make your copywriting more effective at persuading people to buy.
It used to be almost impossible to track down, but has recently been reprinted. Costs heaps tho - $US125!
MY GENERAL TAKE
The good: Some of the most useful copywriting frameworks I’ve ever seen - particularly the stages of awareness.
The less good: Breakthrough Advertising was written in 1966, so the examples are quite dated. This means it can be a bit of a challenge to understand the concepts, because the examples are all for products from the 1960s.
And it’s expensive! More on that in a second.
Overall: In isolation, worth reading. But it’s very expensive. It’s $US125, which works out to more than $200NZD once you account for shipping.
What’s more, it’s very advanced. I have had to read it a couple of times to really make sense of it, and I’m sure I would benefit from reading it a few more times.
If you’re a junior copywriter, or a non-copywriter trying to broaden your skills, you’re probably better off spending $200 on 10 other, easier books. But if you’re a senior copywriter looking to get more of an edge, this book is a great investment.
Living and dying by your ad
This book approaches a specific aspect of copywriting: direct response. That’s copywriting where you’re asking the reader to take an action immediately. That’s different from something like a newsletter, or a blog or a brand awareness ad that is designed to just keep your brand generally top of mind.
Direct response is a more difficult form of copywriting because it’s not enough just to educate your reader or get them thinking about your brand. Successful direct response is when the reader actually takes the action you’ve asked them to take. Anything less, and you haven’t succeeded.
This was even harder work in the 1960s, when marketers and copywriters didn’t have access to rich data about their audience and zillions of channels to reach them. You couldn’t run a retargetting campaign that showed more ads to someone once they looked at one. Rather, you had one shot. You had to grab their interest, sell the benefits then get them to buy, all in one ad.
That’s the context Eugene Schwartz was living in when he developed the frameworks in Breakthrough Advertising - and that’s why they’re still so valuable.
Creating a core concept
One of the key concepts in Breakthrough Advertising is that you can’t create demand. Rather, you have to harness existing demand.
This doesn’t mean you can only sell to people who want your product at this moment. But it does mean that you need to identify a wider desire, then credibly connect that desire to something your product does. This forms the core concept of your ad, and it’s what you’ll build the rest of the ad around.
This is a strategic decision. Every product has lots of different features that connect with lots of different mass desires, in lots of different ways. You can’t possibly cover all of them, so you have to choose one at the exclusion of all the others.
In my experience, this is not something people like doing. It feels risky, because it is - if you choose wisely, you’ll be onto a good thing, but if you misjudge your audience, your ad will flop. Often I see people try to have it both ways, by choosing a few core concepts and writing about all of them. That never really works. You end up with something that tries to say everything to everyone, but ends up not really saying anything to anyone.
For example, a house has heaps of features that connect to different desires. It is:
A place to live
A status symbol
An investment that you live in
An investment that you rent to others
Something that is close to transport, or your destination, or both
In a particular area
Someone looking for a place to live is filling a different desire than someone looking for a status symbol, and someone looking for a place to live that is close to their job is looking to fill a different desire than someone looking for an investment to rent out.
What’s more, different features can apply to different desires. The fact that a place is near transport networks and in a particular area can be desirable to both investors and owner occupiers, but for different reasons (convenience and amenity vs a better rental yield). So choosing one core concept doesn’t restrict you to just one feature. Rather, it gives you a framework to roll a variety of features under.
That’s why it’s so important to pick one mass desire and build your ad around it. It gives context to your product’s various features.
Stages of awareness
This is by far the most useful concept in the book.
One of the main things a copywriter needs to do is define his or her audience. This is one of those things that seems more straightforward than it is. Because it’s not enough to just define an audience by features you can see, like demographic information. Rather, you need to define your audience relative to whatever it is you’re writing.
Defining your audience by their stage of awareness asks just one basic question: “how much do these people know about my product?” The answer breaks down into five groups:
Stage 1: The most aware
These are people who know what your product is, they know what it does and they know that they want it. All they need is basic information such as how much it costs and where to get it.
Naturally, copywriting for these people is not hard. There’s no persuasion involved.
The flyers you get in print newspapers for your local supermarket are a good example of this.
Stage 2: The customer knows of the product but doesn’t want it
This is the area that most advertising targets (or, at least it did in the 60s. I assume this to still be the case).
This is when you’re talking to people who understand your product, they’re just not persuaded that it’s going to add value to their lives. Search engine ads are a great example of this - particularly when they target t key words like competitor brand names.
Stage 3: The customer knows of the problem the product solves, but not the product itself
This is the stage you focus on when you’re launching a new product, or introducing a product into a new market (essentially the same thing).
This is where copywriting really starts to add value, because it’s on the copywriter to articulate the problem in a way that connects to the solution. To successfully do this, the copywriter needs to identify the core problem that the product solves for the customer.
For example, in Xero’s early days, it was one of the first cloud-based accounting software providers. So their tagline was “world’s easiest accounting system.” That doesn’t talk at all about the fact that it was in the cloud, nicely designed, etc etc - rather, it just called out the problem that it solved, which was that accounting was way too hard on existing desktop software.
Stage 4: The customer is aware of the problem, but doesn’t know that solutions exist
This is not that dissimilar from stage 3. The key difference is that customers in this stage have a need but haven’t crystalised that need into a problem.
Medicines are a good example of this. There’s all sorts of ailments that people just expect to live with, but obviously don’t enjoy living with. If you can tap into the pain caused by that ailment, you can crystalise the need into a problem - then present your product as a solution to that problem.
Stage 5: The customer has no idea the problem even exists
The customer doesn’t even know he or she has the problem that you solve.
This is the hardest copywriting - but it’s also the area where you have the most opportunity. If you can make people aware of a problem, then position yourself as a solution, you basically have the entire market to yourself. It’s hard, but it’s winner-take-all.
An absurd analogy
I often use this analogy to understand the stages of awareness.
Stage 1: You have decided to buy a petrol-powered lawnmower to mow your lawn. You’re willing to spend up to $300 on it. Whoever offers you that lawn mower at that price, gets your business.
Stage 2: You have decided to buy a lawn mower to mow your unkempt lawn, but you haven’t decided which one. Is it going to be electric? Petrol? Ride-on? Push? You’re still deciding the specifics.
Stage 3: You are sick of your unkempt lawn, so you have decided to solve the problem by spending money. You’re still tossing up solutions though. Will you hire someone to come by every couple of weeks? Or will you do it yourself?
Stage 4: You know your lawn looks awful, and you don’t like it, but for some reason you don’t realise it’s a problem that can be solved. You look at your terrible lawn every morning and think “ah well, guess I’ll have to live with this.”
Stage 5: You don’t even know you have a problem. Your lawn looks like a jungle, but for some reason you’ve never seen a tidy lawn. So you just assume that all lawns look like jungles.
The state of sophistication
The next thing to think about is the audience’s stage of sophistication. The more sophisticated an audience is, the more they know about your product’s category - and the more advertising they will have been exposed to.
If you run into an audience with a high stage of sophistication, you basically have two options:
Find a way to expand on the claims your audience has already heard. “Like X, but better” is a really common one you see in the tech space (with mixed results)
Go after a less sophisticated market. You can do this by finding a market of people who haven’t seen the previous claims, or repositioning your product around a new market. For example, one of my clients, an eCommerce software company called Storbie, did this a few years ago, by focussing specifically on pharmacists, when really their product is good for any online retailer.
So it’s a tradeoff. The more aware and sophisticated your audience is, the less explaining you have to do. But at the same time, you have more competition. The less aware and sophisticated they are, the less competition you have - but you have to work harder to make them aware of the problem you solve.
All this is to cover headlines
The last three sections cover three things you need to consider when writing just one bit of your copy: your headline.
When you’re writing things like direct response ads that go out to mass markets, your headline is incredibly important. It makes the difference between whether someone stops to read the rest of your ad, or not.
Some ideas for headlines - you can see that you can take all kinds of different approaches.
So if you’re writing something that’s going out to people who don’t yet know who you are, you really want to consider:
The core concept you’re going with, and the tradeoffs you’re making
The stage of awareness of your audience
The stage of sophistication of your audience
This will help you make some pretty tough decisions on what to talk about, what to ignore, and how to pitch your offer.
Writing your body copy
The bulk of the value in this book is in the first few chapters, which I’ve now covered. But I’ll briefly touch on some of the useful techniques in the rest of the book, which specifically deal with how to write body copy - the actual words in your ad.
Intensification
This is extremely useful. It’s the technique of choosing one main idea, and intensifying it in the reader’s mind.
This is something that a lot of copywriting doesn’t do very well at the moment. Lots of the content I see has multiple ideas, all given equal weight. So rather than really make a strong case for one thing, lots of copy makes three weak cases for three different things.
SaaS companies are quite bad for this on their websites. It’s pretty common to run with a vague headline, with three unrelated benefit statements underneath it.
Intensification is about using new information to reinforce the same idea, over and over, until that idea looms large in the reader’s mind - and they’re ready to buy. There’s a basic framework you can follow too. You don’t have to use all of these:
Give a detailed description of your claim
Put the claims into action. Show what it looks like, the benefits it gives, and how it does so
Bring the reader in - put him or her into the action by painting a picture of what his or her life will be like.
Show the reader how to test the claims (and write down how that process works, and the results they’ll get)
Bring in social proof
Bring in expert approval
Compare and contrast with competitor products, and show superiority
Intensify the problem you solve
Show how easy it is to get the benefits you’ve talked through
Use metaphors, analogy and imagination
Summarise!
Put in the guarantee (warranty, whatever)
The key thing here for me is that one idea doesn’t mean short. If you used all of these, you could very easily end up with a multi-page sales letter. But if you do it right, it’ll be multiple pages of content that the reader can’t stop reading - or if they do, it’s to buy your product right away.
This concept - along with the stages of awareness - was one of the most useful concepts in the book.
Gradualisation
This is a tough one that I won’t spend too much time on, because I’m not confident I fully understand it.
Basically, this is when you want to convince someone of a conclusion that they won’t reach without a series of preliminary statements.
In this technique, each statement is a layer of an argument. Each statement is not that contentious, and is something that the reader will quickly agree with. Then, you add a new statement based on the agreement with the previous one. Continue doing this, and the end result is a reader who agrees with your final conclusion - which is, of course, that they should buy your product.
Schwartz uses this ad for a 1950s TV repair guide as an example.
The remaining techniques
I won’t get into the rest because this is already a very long review. If you’re interested, though, you can probably look them up online. The remaining techniques are:
Identification
Redefinition
Mechanisation
Concentration
Camouflage
All of these are really cut from the same cloth: choose an idea that highlights your reader’s problem. Make that problem super clear, and top of mind. Present your product as a solution.
Good luck.
Wrapping up
It’s expensive, it’s not that easy of a read, and it takes a few times to really wrap your mind around it. So if you’re brand new to copywriting, or you’re a business owner who takes care of the copywriting yourself, I would avoid this book. There are lots of more affordable, easy-to-understand books out there.
But if you are already pretty proficient, and you’re looking to level up - spend the $US125. You’ll make it back pretty fast.