An opinion:
The most valuable gold in the late Gene Schwartz’s magnificent “Breakthrough Advertising” book ain’t the main content where it drills deep into the gold mines of headlines, market/product awareness & sophistication, image-building, verbally creating credibility for your offers, and all the other ingenious information inside.
I’d argue it’s in the preface & introduction.
Specifically, the 3 gleaming gems below.
On vision:
“This book is not about building better mousetraps. It is…about building larger mice, and then building terrifying fear of them into your customers.”
On swiping:
“That’s why memorizing theories won’t make you a market wizard, or rewriting somebody else’s headlines won’t make you a copy writer.”
And on… thinking:
“The correct solution, the right headline, the perfect ad lies buried in the problem itself. It has never been written before. It cannot be produced by rote, carbon copying or mutations. But it can be sprung to the surface — automatically — by asking the right question.”
Each one of those gems is worthy of hours of examination.
And of thinking deeply about how to apply them to your business.
Here’s another thought:
Thinking is practically discouraged in copywriting these days.
Something about creativity being bad, the pioneers go home full of arrows, and other one-liners almost always being pushed on people who oh-so-ironically use creativity to the max and are often pioneers.
Thus, the rise in copywriting sex robots.
(i.e., software that supposedly writes copy for you)
Goo-roo fanboys blatantly swiping everything in sight.
And direct response copywriters so ignorant of their own industry they think split testing was invented on Facebook.
Whatever the case, here’s the point:
The one thing that separates the men from the boys when it comes to copywriting ain’t swipe file content, NLP wizardry, 90-year old headline formulas, or hacks.
It’s thinking.
He or she who thinks & solves problems hardest wins.
All right, ‘nuff said.
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Ben Settle
